Word: wyeth
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...exhibition of 300 paintings and drawings by Andrew Wyeth that opened last week at New York's Metropolitan Museum is bound to be successful. That, in the Met's eyes, means so jammed with people that the art will be virtually invisible. At 59, Wyeth is the most popular, perhaps the only popular "serious" artist in America. For the past 20 years his elaborately finished tempera paintings of the landscapes and neighbors around his winter farm in Pennsylvania and his summer house in Maine have become indistinguishable, for an enormous public, from a dream of vanished moral rectitude...
Inside the exhibition, one wonders what all the fuss has been about. Wyeth is clearly what used to be called a petit-maitre. He has staked out a small and somewhat predictable area of visual sensation, a narrow range of images, ideas and colors, and worked it so thoroughly as to exclude all followers. Some memorable works have resulted. The close and beautifully exact tonal painting of a landscape like Brown Swiss (1957)-"I wanted it to be almost like the tawny brown pelt of a Brown Swiss bull," he tells Met Director Thomas Hoving in the catalogue text...
Embalmed with Paint. The detailed, stroked, sandpapered, flecked surface of Wyeth's tempera painting - "weaving" is his own word for it -conveys an obsessive sense of scrutiny. "I really like tempera because it has a cocoon-like feeling of dry lostness-almost a lonely feeling. There's something incredibly lasting about the material, like an Egyptian mummy, a marvelous beehive or hornet's nest." Paint embalms the objects on Wyeth's cold-comfort farms; it stresses their distance from one another and from the eye. Combined with his fondness for large legible shapes and photographic cropping...
...show's weakness is its monotony. Director Hoving, who was obliged to step in as his own guest curator when the Met's curator of 20th century art, Henry Geldzahler, refused to touch the show, has given Wyeth the kind of treatment that only major draftsmen merit. Each painting is surrounded by a flock of its studies and sketches that reveal the working method, the small adjustments, tunings and abstractions that come between the first view and the final painting. If Wyeth were Rubens the spectacle would be fascinating. But since he seems to work upward from illustration...
...have been talking about doing a portrait of him for a couple of years," disclosed Painter Jamie Wyeth after unveiling his version of Pop Artist Andy Warhol last week. Wyeth, who tracked Warhol down to his Manhattan lair two months ago, found his model an "excellent" subject. "He has an incredible childlike quality," observed Jamie. "He was very concerned that I would use too much red in his skin, or show up a pimple." Warhol, who refuses to hang separately, has already snapped off a batch of Polaroid pictures of Wyeth. The patriarch of pop plans to have his counterpart...