Word: wyeth
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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President Eisenhower has been true to the anti-sitting tradition, never allowed more than an hour or two for portraitists-until last month. When TIME commissioned famed Realist Andrew Wyeth to paint the President, both artist and subject hesitated momentarily. Wyeth, a deliberate and profoundly emotional artist, was naturally a bit overawed by the assignment. The President, for his part, was relaxing at Gettysburg, gathering his forces for his momentous and precedent-shattering visit to Europe. But TIME and mutual admiration brought the two together to create an important addition to the picture gallery of American history...
...upward of 20,000 people a day. Guards have a hard time keeping the crowd moving, not because people are impressed by the show so much as because puzzlement halts them. Jackson Pollock's drip picture called Cathedral stops visitors cold. "Where is the cathedral?" they ask. Andrew Wyeth's Children's Doctor and Edward Hooper's stark, vivid Lighthouse at Two Lights are the standout favorites. Among the sculptures on display, Gaston Lachaise's hugely curvaceous Standing Woman is a cynosure. Commented one visitor in the exhibition guest book: "We could use a hefty...
...said the President, "is a very huge affair, and this furor about the art is ... really a relatively minor sector . . . The art is down in two fairly small rooms and the exhibition is all over two floors." As for the selection of paintings, he admitted a preference for Andrew Wyeth's study of an elderly lady, but refused to quarrel with the jury.* "I have nothing to say about them because I am not an artist . . . I am not now going to be any censor...
...Here is a story of a strange world and some troubled people," the dust jacket proclaims, "written by a young man who knows them at first hand." But how does Zane know them? Does he care? Does he approve? Does he condemn? Indeed, for the reader, does it matter? Wyeth and Steiner ultimately appear trivial and absurd. A child, at least, grows up; but the down-and-outs in Easy Living are adults gone to seed. They are grown men and women romping in diapers, shouting to attract our attention, aware of our criticism, scornful of our values, yet forever...
...Life's a gas, man," Wyeth remarks late in the novel. "You just gotta learn to compromise where it counts. Right?" But as Steiner points out, "The trouble is, where does it count?" This, alas, is a problem both for Steiner and Zane. Where does one draw a distinction between the moral and immoral? Neither Wyeth, Steiner, nor Zane seems to be particularly concerned with this question except to the extent that they raise it, then let it drop...