Word: wyeth
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...Carl Ganter, a student in the American-culture program at Northwestern. Throughout the summer the World Notes page has been written by Princeton English Major Wendy Smith, who handled a variety of other articles as well. And this week's cover story on the newly revealed paintings of Andrew Wyeth was reported in part by Amanda Jo Neubardt, who was able to draw on her background as a Barnard art-history major...
Andrew and Betsy Wyeth are the picture of relaxed domesticity as they welcome a visitor to the lighthouse they call home on Southern Island, a 22-acre retreat off the coast of Maine. Tanned and fit, with the kind of face the Romans used to impress on coins, Wyeth, 69, wears a beige sailor's sweater and beige twill pants; his silver-blond hair is closely cropped, like any good sea captain's. Wyeth has been out painting this morning, as he has done every morning for 50 years. "I'm like a prostitute," he says, laughing. "I'm never...
...years together as husband and wife. "I was a cradle snatcher," he notes gleefully of the woman he met when she was 17. The commitment they display toward each other is wholly intertwined in their shared devotion to his work -- the spare, meticulous, compassionate vision that has made Wyeth both a beloved icon to American museumgoers and a nettlesome anachronism to the art establishment. So the Wyeths are girded to ride out, with grace and tweaking good humor, the storm of publicity that broke around them last week, created by a score of press releases sent out to advertise...
Since last week's revelation that Wyeth has been painting a series of 200-plus portraits on the quiet for the past fifteen years, my estimation of him has dropped considerably. It's not that I mind him having done the series in the first place, but if he wasn't planning to tell anyone while he was painting them, why let the secret out now? With Wyeth walking around with a too-pleased-with-himself-for-words smile on his face and his wife, Betsy, talking about the paintings in terms of love and lovers, the entire episode smacks...
...paintings are the same. Helga is another Christina in another world, this time more in tune with the essential earth than before, possibly a reflection of a more sagacious and older Wyeth's point of view. With age comes wisdom but also occasionally paranoia. Perhaps 69-year-old Wyeth felt that if he never said a word about the paintings while he was still alive, they would be misunderstood. Perhaps our castigation of the artist for his mute revelation is too harsh and premature. The calm and gentleness of his hidden secrets excuses almost anything...