Word: wyeth
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...appropriate, for Wyeth, at 56, is one of America's most durable institutions. The audience for advanced art is, as Roy Lichtenstein once wryly observed, about as big as the audience for advanced chemistry. Wyeth's audience, however, runs into the millions. His infrequent exhibitions -the most recent of which is a retrospective organized by Art Historian Wanda M. Corn at the De Young Museum in San Francisco-jam the galleries with visitors; in the U.S. only Picasso can pull more crowds than Wyeth. The price of a Wyeth watercolor begins at about $20,000, and his minutely...
...legend: the salty country boy who never went to school and picked it all up in his father's studio; the brusque down-Easter with a Huck Finn smile who never went for that French art stuff and never once moved out of America. The weathered faces of Wyeth's favorite subjects -Christina Olson, Karl Kuerner or Ralph Cline, the veteran patriot with a skull like a parchment-covered round shot-have become nearly as familiar as Charlie Brown or Donald Duck. They are seen as icons of survival and indomitability, and their clipped-tongue rectitude evokes...
...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...