E A RT H

into Body

B O DY
into Earth
Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009), Winter, 1946, 1946. Tempera. 2017 Andrew Wyeth / Artists Rights Society (ARS). North Carolina
Museum of Art, Raleigh. On view in Andrew Wyeth: In Retrospect at the Brandywine River Museum of Art.

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 A CENTURY OF

ANDREW
WYETH by James D. Balestrieri

I
n my mind, for as long as I can remember, there has been a connection between
the paintings of Andrew Wyeth and the poems of Robert Frost. Im sure Im
not the only one to feel this, nor even the first, and Im equally sure that some
scholar out there would quite easily find the cracks in this connection I feel
or is it see?and the bridge I have built between Wyeth and Frost would
crumble. Its something about the muted colors in Frosts verses and Wyeths canvases,
something about what seems on the surface of each to be a straightforward, four-
square approach to their subjects, their passions, their intentions, something about
the secrets that lie beneath or just beyond those surfaces. Its something about the
spindly woods, about how it always seems to be winter, even in July, something about
the earth, the mud, and light that is cold and hard and white, light that blinds rather
than illuminates. Its how every color seems to start from a base of steel gray, how
every line and shape and space is somehow haunted by a presence that rarely reveals
itself as either benevolent or malign, and is all the more haunting for its reticence.
Its how present the poems and paintings are, and yet, how the pastin the forms of
indifferent local ghostsresides in and is ever present in each.

Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009), Alvaro and Christina, 1968. Watercolor on paper.

Farnsworth Museum of Art. 2017 Andrew Wyeth / Artists Rights Society (ARS).
On view in Andrew Wyeth at 100 at the Farnsworth Art Museum.

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 One hundred years ago this year, Andrew Wyeth was born. As the son of N.C.
Wyeththe famous artist, illustrator and an exacting taskmaster as a fatherit would
not have been surprising if Andrew had veered as far away from art as possible. He
didnt, though it might be said that his art veered away from his fathers, taking its
own course into introspection, isolation and an alliance forged at the intersection of
realism and abstraction.
Andrew Wyeth: In Retrospect, at the Brandywine River Museum of Art, and Andrew
Wyeth at 100, at the Farnsworth Art Museum, take this centennial moment to
reconsider and reappraise Wyeths work and place in American art.
In thinking about this essay you are reading, I discovered that N.C. Wyeth used to
read Frost to his family, that Andrew was moved by Frosts verse, and that, when Frost
was named Americas poet laureate, Andrew Wyeth presented him with a painting.
This surprised me less than you might imagine.
Andrew Wyeth was born in 1917, the year the United States entered World
War I. As Christine Podmaniczky and Henry Adams write in their excellent essays
for the Brandywine catalog, young Andrew Wyeth was captivated by images of
trench warfare and was especially moved by what came to be his favorite film: King
Vidors World War I epic, The Big Parade (still a great film, by the way). Portraits of
Karl Kuerner, who had been a German soldier, in his uniform, and Ralph Cline,
who had fought in the American army, in his, attest directly to Wyeths interest.

Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009), Alvaro on Front Doorstep, 1942. Watercolor on paper. Marunuma Art Park. 2017
Andrew Wyeth / Artists Rights Society (ARS). On view in Andrew Wyeth at 100 at the Farnsworth Art Museum.

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Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009), Evening at Kuerners, 1970. Drybrush watercolor. 2017 Andrew Wyeth / Artists Right Society (ARS).
Private collection. On view in Andrew Wyeth: In Retrospect at the Brandywine River Museum of Art.

Deeper than that are the connections to be made between the mud of the European
battlefields and trenches, the saturating presence of death in the textures of the
earth, and the ghosts of the past, the layers of history, that seep up from the hills
and dunes as Wyeth painted them.Vidors film, battles with toy soldiers, stereoscopic
images of World War I battles, a book of paintings by Claggett Wilsonthe artist
and veteran whose raw, and influential, watercolors of the war I recently wrote
about in these pagescreated Wyeths war memory, a memory that, in turn,
shaped both his philosophy and his style. Podmaniczky writes, [T]he ground
held infinite stories, and so did the grasses and ground he painted as a mature artist.
Working in tempera, Wyeth would have been inspired, indeed excited, by the very
pigments he preferredthe ochres, umbers, and siennas, natural earth colors ground
from rocks and soilwhich held stories only he could imagine.
Winter, 1946, one of the artists greatest works, painted during an incredibly
fruitful period that gave rise to Christinas World, has a no mans land feel, something
of Macbeths blasted heath about it. Wyeth saw the boy, whose name was Allan
Lynch, racing down this hill, Kuerners Hill, and joined him in his games.
But death haunted this place. At the base of Kuerners Hill, only a year earlier,
N.C. Wyeth and his grandsonAndrews nephewhad been killed in an automobile
accident. This very boy, Allan, had guarded the body until firefighters came to cut
it loose, and had pushed away the fierce dogs that had gathered to lick the blood,
writes Adams. In the painting, Lynch seems terrorized by his own shadow, pursued
by some ghost, perhaps time itself. Despite the skill with which Wyeth captures the
boys downhill acceleration, his isolation and desolation arrest him in time. He and
his shadow are part of the land, chthonic beings, organic statuary. As Wyeth said to his

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 Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009), Snow Hill, 1989. Tempera. 2017 Andrew Wyeth / Artists Rights Society (ARS).
Private collection. On view in Andrew Wyeth: In Retrospect at the Brandywine River Museum of Art.

biographer, Richard Merryman, The boy was me at a loss, really. His hand, drifting
in the air, was my hand almost groping, my free soul. At the same time, the hill
where his father had died, became, in Wyeths mind and through the alchemy of his
brush, his father. Wyeth claimed that when he was painting the hill, he could almost
hear his father breathe.
In Robert Frosts poem Birches, the poet/narrator sees birch trees bent by ice and
says: I should prefer to have some boy bend them/ As he went out and in to fetch
the cows/ Some boy too far from town to learn baseball,/ Whose only play was
what he found himself,/ Summer or winter, and could play alone The poem
concludes with a wish to spring away from the world and return, set down gently.
The boy might be Allan Lynchor Andrew Wyeth. In the end its just an old mans
wish for a second chance.
Andrew Wyeths pictorial language is poetic. Soil, snow, white light, brown grasses,
shades of gray: he imposes limits on his subjects and his palette, shaping himself,
through his work, into a genius locia presiding spirit over rural Pennsylvania and
coastal Maine who is himself bound to those places. He derives his power from them;
they reward him through his art.
This idea, that the people Wyeth painted were part of the land, and that the land
along with objects that individual people used routinely in their daily livesnot
only defined the people, but were those people, is the spiritual substratum beneath
the artists mature work; it is an aesthetic transubstantiation. Instead of water and
wine as body and blood, Wyeth transforms the earth into the figures he paints and
the figures he paints into the earth they know as home.

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 Of Christinas World, still one of the best known and most reproduced American
artworks, Wyeth once mused: If I was really good, I could have done the field in
Christinas World without her in there. The less you have in a picture, the better the
picture is, really. Considering how many people love that painting, how much
meaning they find in it, it is truly remarkable for Wyeth to say that it would be
improved by the absence of the figure.
Andrew Wyeth continues to be of the most popular American artists, not only here
in the United States, but in Europe and Asia. But in looking at his temperas of the
Kuerners and Olsons, his paintings of African-Americans and especially the Helga
series,Wyeth is the absolute antithesis of, say, Norman Rockwell. Rockwells homespun
nostalgia, in Wyeth, becomes the tattered lace of a curtain blowing in the open window
of house haunted by its inhabitants. The sense of community that is almost always
present in Rockwell, even when one of his figuresa soldier returning home, for
exampleharbors some darkness, is absent from Wyeth.The continuity that you find in
Grant Woods agrarian Iowa translates as a hardscrabble, punishing existence in Wyeth.
There is relief, at times, in Wyeths watercolors, especially those he did in Maine.Yet even
these run congruently with Robert Frosts sea verse, as in Neither Out Far Nor In Deep:

The land may vary more; They cannot look out far.
But wherever the truth may be They cannot look in deep.
The water comes ashore, But when was that ever a bar
And the people look at the sea. To any watch they keep?

Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009), Pentecost, 1989. Tempera. 2017 Andrew Wyeth / Artists Rights Society (ARS).
Private collection. On view in Andrew Wyeth: In Retrospect at the Brandywine River Museum of Art.

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 Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009), Her Room, 1963. Tempera on panel. Collection of the Farnsworth Art Museum. 2017 Andrew Wyeth / Artists Rights Society
(ARS). On view in Andrew Wyeth at 100 at the Farnsworth Art Museum.

Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009), Two Figures in a Dory, 1937. Watercolor. 2017 Andrew Wyeth /
Artists Rights Society (ARS). Brandywine River Museum of Art, anonymous gift, 2013.
On view in Andrew Wyeth: In Retrospect at the Brandywine River Museum of Art.

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Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009), Airborne Study, 1996. Watercolor on paper. The Andrew and Betsy Wyeth Collection. 2017 Andrew Wyeth
/ Artists Rights Society (ARS). On view in Andrew Wyeth at 100 at the Farnsworth Art Museum.

The truth? Rockwell and Wyeth represent strains of the American character: community
versus solitude; garrulous sociability versus flinty subsistence. People who need people,
as the song goes, versus people who dont (or think they dont). This opposition
permeates our history, our philosophical outlook, our politics. Wyeth worked these
themes into paintings that ride the knife edge between realism and abstraction. We see
the rime-frosted land, the figures turned inward and away, the haunted houses and hills,
knowing full well that they mean something else. But this one-to-one correspondence
between surfaces and meanings breaks down; the transubstantiation twists once more
when the landscape that is the person and the person that is the landscape begin to
reflect our inner doubts and deepest fears. Those people in those paintingsAndrew
Wyeths paintingslive the desolations we all feel.

April 15-December 31 June 24-September 17

Andrew Wyeth at 100 Andrew Wyeth: In Retrospect
Farnsworth Art Museum Brandywine River Museum of Art
16 Museum Street 1 Hoffmans Mill Road
Rockland, ME 04841 Chadds Ford, PA 19317
t: (207) 596-6457 t: (610) 388-2700
www.farnsworthmuseum.org www.brandywine.org

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