Andy's World

(See Cover)

It was a natural question; under the circumstances, anybody would have asked it. Harvard's President Nathan Pusey, chatting with Painter Andrew Wyeth at dinner the night before giving him an honorary doctor of fine arts degree in 1955, inquired: "And where did you go to college?" Wyeth knew that his answer might well be dumfounding to a professional protagonist of formal learning, but he went ahead and said it: "I didn't go to college. I never even went to school." Recalling Pusey's expression now, Wyeth says: "He almost fainted."

Of course, Wyeth did get an education: in academic matters from tutors, in art from his late renowned father N. C. Wyeth. But if in the scholarly sense he never went to school, in the artistic sense he is his own school.

Andrew Wyeth of Chadds Ford, Pa. (pop. 140), and Cushing, Me. (pop. 130), stands high and apart from the mainstream of American art. Manhattan-centered abstract expressionism has in the past two decades given a multitude of new answers to the central questions: What is painting? What is art? What is form? Wyeth is no heroic rearguard defender against that trend. But, in a tradition going back to Rembrandt and to the roots of art, he insists on exploring something else: the condition of nature and the depth of the human spirit.

He paints landscapes and houses, the outside and inside of the world where man lives. Across these carefully recorded scenes, he shows the track, the flicker, the expression of life, even if the living object has long since departed--the print of a heron on the sand, the feeling that a crow flew by, the sea shells lined up in an empty room on a woman's whim. Millions are touched by these intimations, faint but intense; they are touched in their sense of mortality, and they count Andrew Wyeth an incomparable painter.

His temperas are in major American museums, from Manhattan's Met and Modern to Houston's Museum of Fine Arts.* His shows are thronged: 247,800 people went to a month-long Wyeth show in Buffalo last year. Last summer, when President Kennedy picked a painter to be among the first winners of the Medal of Freedom--the U.S.'s highest civilian honor--it was quite inevitable that the choice would be Wyeth. A fortnight ago, President Johnson presented it to him with a citation declaring that "he has in the great humanist tradition illuminated and clarified the verities" of life.

Youthful Spirit. The one most revealing fact about Andrew Wyeth is his age: 46. His paintings may treat of age-old wisdom; his life speaks of free-spirited youth. He has a classic car, a Mark II Lincoln Continental, drives it with abandon. He drinks endless mugfuls of heady, homemade hard cider.

He loves clowning: one Halloween he festooned his tall gaunt frame with animal hair stuck on with flour paste, and roamed Chadds Ford like a bundle of Hydes. When he dresses up for company, he dons a black Amish-elder's jacket that makes him look like Nehru in mourning.

"I am an outdoors painter," he says, and he spends most of his days outside. When he comes home, it is to a 200-year-old fieldstone house, newly remodeled so meticulously in Pennsylvania colonial style that when he first saw it all reconditioned he cracked: "Where do I register?" He has a handsome brunette wife named Betsy, and a pair of youthful, energetic sons.

There is plenty of money to go with all this: the prices that museums pay Wyeth regularly break records, and what he gets from the 60-odd private collectors who have his temperas has occasionally topped the museum prices. He may be the world's best-paid painter after Picasso--and part of the reason is Betsy. Once, 20 years ago, when he did a cover for the Saturday Evening Post for $1,000 and seemed tempted to take a contract with the magazine, she threatened to leave him. "It'll be the end of your painting," she said. Recently, at the suggestion of his dealer, M. Knoedler & Co., she incorporated him as The Mill, Inc., and The Mill pays Wyeth a salary.

A Dignified Recluse. But money does not preoccupy Andrew Wyeth, and his whimsies are mostly a cover-up for what engrosses him, the subjects of his work. The most famous of these is a woman named Christina Olson. He has painted eight temperas of her or her house, a decrepit three-story clapboard pile atop a knoll near the Maine seacoast. One of them, Christina's World, now 15 years old, is one of the most durable and disquieting images of 20th century America. Against the wall of landscape that leads up to her house, the crippled body of an ageless woman seems trapped, imprisoned by the very emptiness of the earth. Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art, which hesitated before buying it in 1948 for $2,200, has repaid its investment 22 times over in the sale of reproductions.

Christina, who is crippled by polio, is one of Wyeth's few close friends. He judges people by their reactions to her. "I don't take some people to see her," says Wyeth, "because they won't understand." He fears that they will find her grotesque. Christina's house contains the anonymous leavings of years of confinement. The smell of burning oil, charred wood, fat cats and old cloth fills the air. Christina, now nearing 70, does not let anyone see how she moves about, stubbornly refuses to use a wheelchair. "Andy's a very good friend," she says. "I like to pose for him. He talks a great deal when he paints, but he doesn't talk nonsense." She does not talk nonsense either. Despite her painful loneliness, she is dignified, proud and intelligent.

None of Wyeth's portraits of Christina look alike; the artist injects his own humanity into the people and places around him. More than anything else that Wyeth paints, Christina's individuality and inner strength are a mirror-portrait of the artist himself. She is a touchstone of his compassion.

"Eloise, Ocean Breeze!" What Wyeth will paint next is what currently worries him most. But winter is the season that best inspires him, and he is full in the process of making the watercolors that are the harbingers of his temperas. He bundles up in boots, a turtleneck, a ratty forest-green hacking jacket with a ragged velvet collar, and a shaggy sheepskin coat. He grabs his watercolor kit, clucks at his dogs to follow, and lopes off across the snow-spotted fields. When he finds what he wants, he plunks right down in the slush and goes to work with a fury, often until his fingers turn blue.

"He looks like he's in a battle," says Painter Peter Hurd, his brother-in-law. "He stabs at the work as if with a stiletto, dabbing with a bit of Kleenex, slashing with a razor blade." The water-colors materialize by the hundreds, spattery with a bravura immediacy.

While Wyeth works, his favorite dog Eloise, a miniature black poodle with a just-so Continental clip, digs holes and sprays both the artist and his watercolors with dirt. When Eloise thinks it is time to get out of the cold, she trots up to Wyeth's watercolor pan and tips it over with her nose. The artist nuzzles into her curly fur, murmuring a ritual incantation, "Eloise, ocean breeze!" Then he comes home with her and Rattler, the gold hound depicted in Distant Thunder.

In the Studio. For the long, hard work of painting in egg tempera, a technique that has not been in common practice since the quattrocentro, Wyeth will retreat to his studio near the old family home where he was brought up. He hates to be watched in his studio--except by dogs and kids. The William A. Farnsworth Library and Art Museum in Rockland, Me., has recently bought an essay by Troy Kaichen, a literate Gushing boy, who knows Wyeth well. It describes Wyeth at work.

"The studio of Andrew Wyeth the Painter contains nothing else but what he's working on," wrote Troy. "In the center of the room sits Mr. Wyeth with a large easel in front of him. Every once in a while Mr. Wyeth gets up and walks to a mirror hanging on the wall. The first time he did this I asked him why. He answered, 'For some reason you can see the picture more clearly in the mirror than you can just looking at it.' Mr. Wyeth stepped aside and I looked into the mirror myself. Sure enough the picture was much brighter and clearer.

"Mr. Wyeth went back to his painting. He had run out of an important color; so he took two tubes, squeezed some paint from each of them and then he poured some yellow liquid into the whole mess. Wondering, I asked him what the yellow stuff was. 'That's egg yolk,' he replied. 'Have you ever noticed that if you drop an egg and don't clean it up immediately it sticks and you can't get it off? It does the same thing in pictures. Also if you use yolk the picture will not fade like ordinary watercolors.' 'Doesn't it affect the color of the paint?' I asked. 'No,' he said, 'surprisingly enough it doesn't affect the color at all.'

"Leaning on the walls and lying all over shelves are sketches that Mr. Wyeth has made. He has sketches in color which make small pieces of the picture. When he sits down to work on the painting he has to fit the pieces together in his mind. The hardest part is just going on and on and on to finish the job after you're over the excitement of suddenly knowing what you want to do and the fast sketches.

"Like anyone else returning from work Mr. Wyeth changes out of his old paint-spattered pants when he gets in the house. When he returns from the studio he always has paint on himself too. One place is really very noticeable --a long streak on his lower lip. That comes from wiping the extra paint off his brush; since his lip is handy, he makes use of it."

A Dynasty of Art. The name Wyeth is familiar to almost every kid who ever had a library card, because it belongs to the most ambitious American art dynasty since the 18th century Philadelphia painter Charles Willson Peale named his children Rembrandt, Rubens, Raphaelle and Titian and brought two of them up to join a raft of relatives in the family trade. The Wyeth dynasty was founded when Newell Converse Wyeth went in 1903 from Massachusetts to Wilmington, Del., to study painting with the scholarly illustrator Howard Pyle. Often Pyle and his favorite pupil would journey the twelve miles out of Wilmington to Chadds Ford to paint along the banks of the Brandywine near the old gristmill. Within three years, N.C. had married, and soon after put down roots in the Pennsylvania hills.

N.C.'s artistic style set the style for his family. Ruddy, with the outdoorsy zest of his Welsh ancestors, he painted robust men of action whose thighs and biceps strained the seams of some of the best-executed costumes in all book illustration. Generations of children know the gnarled tree trunks of Sherwood Forest from his illustrations for Robin Hood, or Blind Pew frantically tapping down the road after his cowardly companions in Treasure Island. Although N.C. wished to be remembered as a muralist, his best-known works bear such romantic titles as "One more step, Mr. Israel Hands, and I'll blow your brains out."

Method Painting. Last of his father's five children, Andrew Wyeth was born into a virtual factory of fantasy. N.C. spouted Shakespeare as he dosed his children with castor oil, encouraged them to set up toy theaters all over the house, and persuaded them well up into their teens that Santa Claus did indeed exist. But his greatest gift was teaching his brood how to re-create drama, and a little art colony sprang up by the Brandywine.

"Never paint the material of the sleeve," N.C. would roar. "Become the arm!" It was classical instruction, demanding empathy with the object. Yet the leonine old illustrator never let his pupils fall for the pathetic fallacy--that empty barrels are lonely. He believed that the painting must find an echo inside the painter--in a sense, Method painting. It was all done with such verve and warmth that, as Sister Carolyn says, "there was nothing arty about it. It was like coasting, like playing outside in the snow."

The White Company. Quite naturally, the dynasty flourished. The eldest, Henriette, a painter in her own right, is married to Painter Hurd. Most eccentric of the children is Carolyn, now 54, who gallivants about in a flat black Gaucho hat, paints and teaches art classes. Sister Ann, 48, turned to music, but married one of N.C.'s students, John McCoy, and stayed on in Chadds Ford. Brother Nathaniel, 52, "drew neat little pictures inside little squares," married a niece of Howard Pyle, and quite naturally became a creative engineer in research for Du Pont in nearby Wilmington.

As the bouncy benjamin of N.C.'s children, Andy enjoyed a special freedom from responsibility. Two weeks in the first grade of the Chadds Ford school made Andy "nervous," so his father generously took him out and supplied a tutor until he was 16. He grew up like Peter Pan, a prisoner of fantasy. "As a kid," he says, "I adored Robin Hood, D'Artagnan, and"--he adds innocently--"Dracula." N.C. designed an immense castle, which his eldest son, Nat, built for the children's playroom. Andy became its lord and staged jousts within its battlements.

He hoarded the kind of toy soldiers that struck extravagant poses, and left those that stood stiffly at attention to the other children. At the age of nine, Andy did a book of watercolors, full of musketeers and damsels in distress, and romantically titled The Clang of Steel. When he was twelve, Andy staged a memorable performance, Lilliputian-style in a theater that he made himself, of the battle in The White Company, the Arthur Conan Doyle drama of a staunch medieval company of soldiers, which N.C. had illustrated. The old playroom castle still sits in Andy's studio, and the toy soldiers are billeted in a light box in his bedroom. "I've always loved miniature things," he says. "Maybe that's why I turned to the fine technique of tempera."

Andy spent at least two years half believing that he was Robin Hood. In a green hat and a phony blond beard, he romped the woods with Little John, a Negro playmate named David ("Doo-Doo") Lawrence, and a band of merry youngsters. Sometimes they would swoop down on a wealthy noble, such as the grocery boy, and back in the forest they would picnic on robbed riches. Another childhood chum was Vincent T. ("Skootch") Talley, who, before he died this month, recalled that Andy's greatest thrill was a mock re-enactment of the battle of Brandywine. "We had one thing in common," said Skootch. "We never grew up."

"My Father, of Course." The Wyeths always summered in Maine, and there, on his 22nd birthday, Andy met his future wife, who was then only 17. The next year, while he continued to study and paint with his father, they were married. When the war years came, he tried to enlist, but was decisively 4-F'ed because of crooked hip joints, which give him a gangly gait. Instead, at a time when U.S. art was at a virtual standstill, he churned out vigorous, splashy watercolors that explored flattened space, joyous color and jumpy line in such a way that they could have marked him as a nascent abstract expressionist.

The idyl ended on an October morning in 1945: N.C. was killed by a train that struck his station wagon in Chadds Ford. Wyeth took his father's death harder than any of the others in the family. Intimations of mortality clouded the clear sky of fantasy. He had never painted his father. Three years after N.C.'s death, Wyeth painted Karl, a stern portrait of his neighbor Karl Kuerner, shown in his attic room. Above Karl's head are two meat hooks, like falcon's claws, thrust down from the ceiling. Says Wyeth: "It was really a portrait of my father, of course."

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 and were Betsy's Christmas gift to him in 1950. Wyeth wore them while taking long walks to regain his strength. He explained: "The painting came to signify to me a close relationship between critical illness and the refusal to accept it--a kind of stalking away."

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 Ray. Says Wyeth, "Some day I'll be known as James Wyeth's father."

The 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 over the years is Brother-in-Law Hurd, a New Mexico painter of Western landscapes, who years ago taught Wyeth how to paint with tempera. Together, though, they are more apt to top each other's tall tales than talk art.

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 the story," he says. "There are some people who like my work because they see every blade of grass. They're seeing only one side of it. They don't see the tone. If you can combine realism and abstraction, you've got something terrific."

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.

The Ever-Subtler Second. From the depiction of high drama as his father taught it, Wyeth has narrowed down to the moments when life is charged with change, swapping N.C.'s clash of cut lasses for his own clap of distant thunder. Sometimes it is only the tragic twinkle of quaker ladies, blossoming while he watches and fading in the frosty dew of early spring. Disciplining the romantic inside him, he has sought the ever-subtler second when existence is galvanized by the unexpected.

"It's got to give me goose pimples," he says. His flesh crawls at odd moments. In Wind from the Sea Wyeth opens an upstairs window in Christina Olson's house in a room that has been closed for years, and the billowing of lace curtains lets in a sudden puff of salty air. Wyeth is moved. Abruptly glimpsing his own reflection in a dusty mirror leads to an unexpected 1949 self-portrait, The Revenant, where he stands perplexed and unbalanced in an abandoned room. The amber glass ball on a lightning rod in Northern Point looks to him "as if it were spinning in mid-air." And after four days of straddling the roof top and examining it with his feverish watercolor brush, Wyeth slowly turned to recapture in tempera that first instant of surprise.

Scratches at the Mask. Wyeth paints a timeless natural world, probing past the facades of nature, where some people only see picnic sites, to a further reality behind. He has sketched countless pencil studies of tiny seed pods as fragilely faceted as snowflakes, made exquisite drybrush watercolors* of bees' honeycombs in winter. Thus he scratches at the mask of nature, attempts by imitation to expose her identity. For Wyeth well knows now one poignant tragedy of man: that he can never know all his world before it vanishes from his sight.

This line of investigation makes his New York contemporaries view Wyeth as a country cousin. To Larry Rivers, "He's like someone who writes marvelous sonnets, but I don't read sonnets much." To Jack Levine, he is "a symbol of real, real bedrock Americanismo." Painter Robert Motherwell, formerly an art historian, says: "I would imagine that an impressionist would have looked at the pre-Raphaelites with astonishment, and I feel a parallel astonishment regarding the works of Wyeth." But they all look carefully at what Wyeth does, and agree that there is something uncanny, macabre and mysterious about it.

"Who?" To some, a man who bothers to paint a blade of grass is an anachronism who must have been born in the previous century. The late Bernard Berenson, going on guesswork, believed that Wyeth was dead ("What a pity America has starved its painters," he murmured). No foreign museums or collectors have ever bought his work.*

Few foreigners recognize his existence, although the abstract expressionists are well known abroad, and even the Pop artists have attained some vogue. When Bernard Dorival, director of Paris' Museum of Modern Art, was asked about Wyeth, he replied, "Who? But perhaps we pronounce his name differently here." Wyeth returns the compliment. He has never felt the need to go to Europe--or, for that matter, to much of anywhere else that is very far from Chadds Ford or Cushing.

Wyeth feels that if he wants to find exotic things, he need only explore a couple of miles beyond the gas station at the Chadds Ford crossroads. But if he does not first learn his own small world to the last detail, how will he abstract the vibrancy and vitality from it, how will he record the unexpected, the out-of-kilter, the sudden clap of distant thunder? So he has chosen to follow the advice of Poet-Painter William Blake and see a world in a grain of sand.

Rarely does he put more than a single figure in his stark snow fields, against his battered barns, or on his bleak rock shelves. "I want to show Americans what America is like," says Wyeth. He does this with a uniquely American vision--man pressed against the enormous sky by the upsurge of a land that he has owned for such a scant time that he does not yet feel part of it.

Robert Frost wrote, "The land was ours before we were the land's"; Wyeth paints Young America (1950) showing a boy in the garb of a footloose youth riding an extravagant bicycle in all the vastness of America. As he often does, Wyeth actually painted the figures over a completed landscape, afterthoughts in a void.

From the Microcosm. "I think that the really American thing in my painting is movement," says Wyeth. He was most excited by the technical challenge of depicting the flying spokes of the wheels. But there was the restless, lonely conquering of space, which Americans have had as a challenge since they first set foot in the broad New World. "I was struck by the distances in this country," said Wyeth, "which are more imagined than suggested in the picture --by the plains of the Little Big Horn and Custer and Daniel Boone and a lot of other things in our history."

The Young American is only a boy that Wyeth knows, not a totem conjured up from American mythology. He proves that the microcosm of Chadds Ford and Cushing is not so intimate a topography that the whole world cannot be gleaned from it. As Gertrude Stein wrote, "Anybody is as their land and air is," and Wyeth's land and air happen to be everybody's. It is a visible metaphor of any world for any man.

* Others that have temperas: Milwaukee Art Center; Wilmington (Del.) Society of the Fine Arts; Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, Mass.; Toledo Museum of Art; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia; William A. Farnsworth Library and Art Museum in Rockland, Me.; Shelburne (Vt.) Museum; New Britain (Conn.) Museum of American Art; Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Conn.; and Currier Gallery of Art in Manchester, N.H. * Drybrush, used by Wyeth's mentor of the miniature, Albrecht Duerer, as early as 1450, is more like drawing than watercoloring in technique. The artist works over still wet washes of water-soluble pigment with a brush dipped in concentrated color and squeezed almost dry. The stiff bristles, flattened and frayed looking, add textures of weight and depth. "I use it for the grass on a hill, for example, or the bark of a tree," says Wyeth. * The National Gallery of Norway in Oslo has the 1959 tempera, Albert's Son, by donation from former U.S. Ambassador to Norway L. Corrin Strong.

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