Word: wyeth
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Easy Living concerns the escapades of two American expatriates who sleep in or about Paris and London. One, a bastard named only Wyeth, moves from bed to bed, uncaring and undiscriminating, seeking only to assuage a deep-down itch. His friend, Harry Steiner, is escaping from his middle-class Bronx past, from the squares back home, from his own terrible insecurity. They dig the easy life, the life of least resistance, the life of escape via jazz, junk, drink...
...Here is a story of a strange world and some troubled people," the dust jacket proclaims, "written by a young man who knows them at first hand." But how does Zane know them? Does he care? Does he approve? Does he condemn? Indeed, for the reader, does it matter? Wyeth and Steiner ultimately appear trivial and absurd. A child, at least, grows up; but the down-and-outs in Easy Living are adults gone to seed. They are grown men and women romping in diapers, shouting to attract our attention, aware of our criticism, scornful of our values, yet forever...
American Romance. Wyeth is limited. Compared with such a robust realist as Velásquez, he seems hardly to believe in reality. Compared with such a profound explorer-in-imagination as Pieter Brueghel, he sits by the stove cozily sketching. In context, his art has eminence. But the context is a shallow sea, shored by the book illustrations of his father, N. C. (for Newell Convers) Wyeth, and bounded at the horizon by the craggy islands of Thomas Eakins and Winslow Homer...
...wishing, apparently, to pass beyond those islands-which may yet represent the farthest outposts of American painting-Wyeth reaches and tacks about, fishing for details as if they were really whales. His most ambitious pictures are sometimes the least successful, being too finicky and insistent. But Roasted Chestnuts bids fair to rival Wyeth's famed Young America (TIME, July 16, 1951) as a national icon. Young America shows a boy in G.I. castoffs riding a gaudy bicycle across a limitless plain. Roasted Chestnuts gives new depth to the romance. It looks like the same boy, grown to gangly youth...
Underlying Life. Even more surprising as a whole are Wyeth's new watercolors, pictures done swiftly in passion. His instinct for the medium has grown out of discipline, and his command of it is athletic-brushmanship like swordsmanship. Wyeth's Cormorants inhabit a small island off the Maine coast, near his summer home. "I rowed over," Wyeth says in his high, dry voice. "There was a terrific shrieking and neck-turning. The picture took only half an hour, but the birds kept dropping on me all the time. There was a strange feeling of aloneness -of the cormorants...