Word: wyeth
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...landscape they inhabit resembles them. Dour, bare and snow-patched, with low horizons of brown hill or gray water, a wind incessantly prying at the boards of the creaky frame houses, it is the soil from which virtue is meant to grow; even the pumpkin on Wyeth's fence post, if pumpkins could vote, would have voted for Ike. "Wyeth country"-the Pennsylvania farm land around Chadds Ford, where he spends the winter, and the summer acreage in Maine-has become landscape as myth or monument by now, the American middlebrow's equivalent of Cezanne's Mont...
Certainly, much of Wyeth's success flows from nostalgia. Many people would like to project themselves at first hand, exchanging-for half an hour -their self-cleaning ovens for the black, bulbous wood stove that squats in the Ericksons' kitchen, and their disaster-crammed TV screens for the lean prospect glimpsed from the Olsons' attic window. Small wonder, then, that Wyeth's critics have dismissed "the other Andy" (as one of them, thinking of Warhol, called him) as a fabulist, and his images as a sentimental mix of frontierland and Cold Comfort Farm. The objection...
Theatricality has been in Wyeth's marrow since childhood, and his paintings, when weak, rarely permit one to forget the atmosphere of lantern-lit masquerade in which his father, the profusely talented illustrator N.C. Wyeth, reveled. When swashbuckling or fantasticated, as in much of his work before the 1960s, that theatricality could make Wyeth seem as vulgar as Thomas Hart Benton-though much subtler in design and drawing...
...Although Wyeth is sometimes described as a "realist," the term is misleading when applied to him; his images are not direct transcriptions of what he sees, unedited slices of life. There is always a great deal of compression, suppression and choice-sometimes, it is true, bending to sentimentality but in his best work at the service of an elusive poetry of mood. The painter would like to be invisible, to have his subjects treat him as if he were not there. "You see, I'm a secretive bastard. I wish I could paint without me existing, that just...
...recent step in Wyeth's slow move away from anecdote is marked by a group of nudes. The model was a teenage girl named Siri Erickson, daughter of one of Wyeth's Finnish neighbors. "She had this immense vitality," says Wyeth. "I liked that directness. She's part of the country, planted in it, absolutely unselfconscious. Lipstick never entered her mind." He met her shortly after his favorite woman model (or character), Christina Olson, died. "Siri seemed like a bridge to me, or a new cycle; life coming out of death." The resulting pictures, done between...