The Wyeths
Anambitious exhibition at the Naples Museum of Art showcases three generations of this artistic family, but Andrew Wyeth undeniably is the star.
By LENNIE BENNETT
Published April 23, 2006
NAPLES
Andrew Wyeth has never had a bad hair day. That isn't a glib, throwaway comment. It's a tribute. You could also say he never met a blade of dry grass he didn't love.
Wyeth's love of the particular and his talent in painting it are abundantly revealed in "Andrew Wyeth and Family," an ambitious exhibition at the Naples Museum of Art. About 70 works of Andrew Wyeth are bracketed by about 40 more by his father, the late N.C. Wyeth, and his son, Jamie Wyeth, each a considerable talent.
One of the values of this show, organized by the museum, is seeing the three generations together as a continuum. We can imagine the pressure, ambition and competition that has to coexist with love among such a creative bunch of relatives.
There's no contest in this show; Andrew Wyeth, now 89, is its star, and its centerpiece is a group of 50 paintings and drawings from Wyeth's Helga Pictures, a body of about 240 works he created in secret of his neighbor, Helga Testorf.
The Helga Pictures caused a sensation beyond the art world when they became public - one landed on the cover of Time magazine in 1986 - and made Wyeth, already a successful artist, into a reluctant celebrity. The fracas died down and most were purchased by a single collector who sold them to an anonymous Japanese investor who stored them for years in a warehouse. Recently a group of U.S. investors bought them under the name of Pacific Sun Trading Co., which is the lender for this exhibition.
Also included are three more recent portraits of Helga, one dated 2002.
Museum organizers say this is the largest single display of the Helga Pictures and probably the last in a long time.
But back to the hair, and Helga's is a good place to start. Wyeth paints it with tender precision, loose and flowing or braided, honoring each tendril as a life force and emblematic of his treatment of all his animate and inanimate subjects.
As dark as his palette typically is, Wyeth is not a brooding psychological painter. The pleasure comes in appreciating his mastery of watercolor (especially the drybrush watercolors) and egg tempera, mediums to which he has been resolutely faithful during his long career.
We aren't meant to search below the surfaces for deeper meanings, even in the varied ways he has explored his blond muse. He can paint her as a lyrical beauty in Crown of Flowers and as a more severe woman in The Prussian. But in both, we are interested in her - as he clearly is - as a subject rather than a personality. Even the nudes, and there are quite a few in this show, are rendered more as studies of a human form he comes to know very well. They aren't really detached but they suggest no emotional connection.
Helga's place in a landscape is as a passer-by. In Easter Sunday, she gazes at a wintry landscape framed by the porch's ceiling and columns, as still as the scene on which she gazes. The near monochrome of the watercolor is startling. The expanse of snow is stark white - no painterly tricks to give it surface nuance. He paints it as we think of it, straightforward and blank. Leaves drifting in the foreground are as big - and the same colors - as Helga's head and shoulders in Walking in her Cape Coat. Her point in the scene seems to be simply a means of textural contrast.
His more recent paintings of Helga seem lighter. In Gone, dated 2002, she poses against a beautifully rendered backdrop of creamy white wood, dressed in white, shown in profile. Her features are as angular, but they have a Katharine Hepburn quirkiness to them, her hair piled into a ponytail and tied with a big flower.
Jamie Wyeth's landscapes and portraits, of both people and animals, are more freighted than his father's. Born in 1946, he did, after all, come of age during the Vietnam War. He grew up surrounded by an extended family of artists and was home-schooled at an early age after he evinced a strong desire and aptitude for painting.
He has some fine watercolors in this exhibition, but his strongest medium is oil paint.
Like his father, he has an eye for the objective "thingness" of his subjects, but they all are executed with a sense of individual personality stirring beneath their surface interest. Seagulls, painted looking up at them as they pose on a beach, have a goofy, wild-eyed mien. Cattle approach in trusting camaraderie, their numbered labels looking like name tags at a Rotary Club luncheon.
His portraits are infused with emotional explorations that his father seems to avoid. Jamie Wyeth's haunting portrait of John F. Kennedy shows the most powerful person in the Western world slumped in his chair, ambivalence and uncertainty in his eyes. It was commissioned by his family after his death but they reportedly detested it because it wasn't idealized enough. That's its power.
In a way, Jamie Wyeth cleaves more to his grandfather's illustrative genius. N.C. Wyeth is most famous for his beautiful paintings for books such as Robin Hood, Treasure Island and The Last of the Mohicans. Several of them are on view, testaments to his gift for selecting a moment from a novel and extending the narrative pictorially.
N.C. longed to be considered a "serious" painter, but the lucrative contracts from publishers and a comfortable life for his family were too compelling for him to chuck his professional success and take his chances with collectors and art critics.
A summing up of the three artists and the personal ethos that links and separates them is early in the show. A landscape by each is displayed on a wall. N.C. Wyeth's is a bucolic look at Eight Bells, the family home. Andrew Wyeth paints an old house whose beauty is in its dignified, weathered survival, with little apparent help from human hands whose presence is only suggested. Jamie Wyeth's house is also shaded in deep tones but we can see a man reading. We join with the artist in becoming Peeping Toms, curious about the life inside.
N.C. accepted his status as an illustrator and his progeny have often been dismissed as merely that as well. It's true the Wyeths do look at a person, animal or haystack and paint it with an unfashionable verisimilitude. But their fascination with the stuff of this world is similar to the found art of Robert Rauschenberg and his philosophical offspring. The difference is intent. Found artists want to make something more of a thing. The Wyeths believe it's good as it is.
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The Naples Museum has six other exhibitions currently: "Modern Mexican Masters: Selections from the Pollack Collection," "American Modernism: Selections from the Permanent Collection," "Early American Modernism from the Heckscher Museum of Art," "Masters of Miniature" and "The Grand Tour in Miniature - The Stage" all through July 30 and "Frank Lloyd Wright and the House Beautiful" through June 25.
The miniatures are charming, meticulously crafted rooms including re-creations of French period rooms. One contains a Louis XV desk made from 16,000 microscopic pieces of fruitwood.
Also part of the miniatures is an 18th century French mansion commissioned by collector Patricia Pistner using period materials and exquisite details such as petit point carpets with 1,600 stitches to the square inch and leather-bound books with real text.
I'm a sucker for such preciousness.
The Frank Lloyd Wright exhibition is accompanied by a dramatic model of one of the architect's most famous buildings, Fallingwater.
Seeing it all can take several hours, and the Wyeth show has attracted large crowds that make it more time-consuming to see well.
Lennie Bennett can be reached at (727) 893-8293 or lennie@sptimes.com.
REVIEW
"Andrew Wyeth and Family: N.C., Andrew and Jamie?" is at the Naples Museum of Art, 5833 Pelican Bay Blvd., Naples, through May 14. Hours are 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday and noon to 4 p.m. Sunday. Admission is $15 for adults and $5 for students. (239) 597-1900 or go to www.thephil.org.
TODAY IN TRAVEL
Naples, about 150 miles south of St. Petersburg, makes for a fun overnight trip, Lennie Bennett writes.