Word: wyeth
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Five years after his father's death, when Wyeth was 33, some bloodstains on his pillow led him to the discovery that he was suffering from bronchiectasis, a disease of the bronchial tubes of one lung. They were removed in an operation so drastic that his chest had to be opened from top to bottom, slashing his shoulder muscles so that he thought he might never be able to paint again. While convalescing, he painted The Trodden Weed, with his arm suspended in a sling from the ceiling. The boots that flatten the weed once belonged to Howard Pyle...
Both his shoulder muscles and his health knitted back together, although he still cannot get life insurance. Since then, Wyeth, along with finishing two or three temperas a year, has set himself to continuing the dynasty. His eldest son, Nicky, 20, is a freshman at Delaware's Wesley Junior College and plans to go into art dealing. Afternoons, Wyeth teaches the family trade to his other son, Jamie, 17. So fast has Jamie learned painting that the proceeds from his work sit in front of the staid Wyeth house like a visitor from Mars-a red-hot Corvette Sting...
...taste with which the Wyeths live is as high as the taste of their art. Says a family friend: "Their house, the way the table is set, even the food they eat are all done with a lack of pretense, a genuineness, a judgment that is a delight. Between the pictures and their lives, there is no break." On Thanksgiving, the clan gathers until there are often 20 at table. Betsy cooks up a storm straight out of the Gourmet Cookbook, and-though she might still chill them-there are vintage French burgundies to add some thunder. A frequent visitor...
Where Now, Brown Cow. Wyeth knows that his work is sometimes admired by the wrong people for the wrong reasons. "Ooooo!" he mocks, "Mr. Wyeth, such a bee-o-o-ooootiful cow!" Says he: "I'm a pure abstractionist in my thought. I'm no more like a realist, such as Eakins or Copley, than I'm like the man in the moon." Wyeth is neither a slave to the faithful detailing of nature, as were Courbet and Manet, nor a scientific observer of light and atmosphere, as were the impressionists. "I want more than half...
...Wyeth frequently does. He "pulls things down to simplicity," excluding from his work the superfluous and the sentimental. He is an expressionist, selecting from his subjective feeling only what is necessary to the painting. In his Brown Swiss, a skyless 1957 landscape titled for the breed of cows crossing it, Wyeth blithely eliminated the cows. Instead, he showed narrow cow paths like the creases of a worried century across the brown brow of a hillside. Nowadays, he feels that he could even have removed Christina from Christina's World and still have conveyed the same sense of loneliness...