Word: wyeth
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...strongly resent Robert Hughes' snide remarks concerning the Metropolitan Museum's retrospective show of Andrew Wyeth...
...applaud "Hard-Sell" Hoving. He, at least, has enough sense to realize that museums must sell, and that Wyeth's "small and somewhat predictable area of visual sensation" is vastly preferable to Jackson Pollock's large and somehow unpredictable area of dribbles and drops...
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...
Starting with Jackson Pollock, one can easily think of a dozen modern American artists who have not had retrospectives at the Met but whose works possess richer cultural and historical meaning than Wyeth's. Why, then, the immense accolade? The reason is simply box office. The Metropolitan Museum hopes to make at least $2 million from the sales of Wyeth catalogues and souvenir reproductions alone. To ram the point home, a boutique has been set up at the show's exit, and visitors have no choice but to run the gauntlet. Hard sell Hoving strikes again...