Winterthur & The Brandywine River Museum

[I originally wrote this report, part of a larger one on some performances and art exhibits, between 11-13 May 2004, years before I started ROT.  Since the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., has installed a new show, Andrew Wyeth: Looking Out, Looking In, and the Washington Post ran a lengthy article on the artist (which I posted on ROT a few days ago), I decided to run this archival report on my visit, first, to the DuPont’s Winterthur, and then to the nearby Wyeth art museum, the Brandywine River Museum.]

Because my mother gave me a very heavy iron sculpture for my last birthday and I couldn’t fit it into the rental car last winter, we decided that she’d drive back to New York City with me in her car and we’d transport the sculpture then.  We had been talking about visiting both Winterthur, the DuPont estate near Wilmington, Delaware, and the Brandywine River Museum, the former home and studio of the Wyeth family of painters (N.C.; his son, Andrew; Andrew’s sisters and brothers-in-law; and Jamie, Andrew’s son) in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania—just over the border from Winterthur, about a half-hour drive away.  The timing or the weather hadn’t been right every time we considered it, but I suggested that perhaps while I was in D.C. we could make one overnight or two day trips—both sites are about 1½-2 hours from D.C.—since I was going to be around for almost two weeks this time.  Dates didn’t work out for a side trip while I was in D.C., so we decided to detour on the way to New York—it’s a short detour—and spend the night between the visits to Winterthur and the Wyeth museum.  I found a motel in Wilmington that accepts pets (there are websites for this information!), and we made reservations for the three of us (!) and arranged for entry tickets for the two sites—the motel had a package for rooms plus the admissions; it was just easier that way.  We loaded up the car with our stuff, the iron sculpture, and Thespis and drove north.

We got away a little later than we had hoped, but since we packed lunch, we stopped only for a pee-pee break and got to the motel about 2 p.m. or so.  Winterthur is open until 5 p.m., so we unpacked a little, I walked my dog, Thespis, and got him settled in the room, we got (misleading) directions to the estate, and set out to see Winterthur.  (There’s road construction, and the motel staff, though the place advertises its proximity to both sites—as well as the package deals—wasn’t too swift with directions to anywhere.  Go know.)  Anyway, we did get to Winterthur with enough time to see the estate and take one of the arranged tours.  We ended up on the Elegant Entertaining tour which focuses on the dining and entertaining rooms and the china, silver, furniture, and more, used for that purpose displayed in those spaces.

To explain a bit—Winterthur is a huge estate.  Not just the grounds, which are extensive (it used to have its own golf course!), but the building is immense.  Plus it’s been added to many, many times since it was first built in the early 1800’s until it was turned over to the state as a museum in 1950.  (The name Winterthur comes from Jacques Antoine Bidermann (1751-1817), a son-in-law of Eleuthère Irénée du Pont de Nemours (1771-1834), the founder of the du Pont family and fortune in the United States.  The son-in-law, who built the original house was Swiss German, and Winterthur was his hometown in Switzerland.)  They don’t permit people just to arrive and wander about the house—the ticket gets you entry to the gardens and galleries (that is, the museum), but you have to purchase a tour to see the mansion itself.  There’s no way to see all of it in one go (it has several hundred rooms, all told) so the tours are divided into themes.  For instance, one focuses on the living quarters and another, as I said, on the entertaining facilities.  I don’t remember all the other ones, but unless you have a special interest in something DuPont, it hardly matters—they all get you into the house to see parts of the mansion and the decorative items in it.  The last DuPont to live at Winterthur, Henry Francis du Pont (1880-1969), was a collector of American decorative arts—furniture, porcelain, figurines, tea services, and so on—and the house is a museum in that respect.  It can get overwhelming, but a lot of it is exquisite.  The rich did live well before WWII (and not too shabbily since, I believe), but they don’t all have any taste.  (Take, for instance, San Simeon: Hearst just bought stuff—a lot of it hideous!)  But the DuPonts, especially the last guy who essentially turned the place into a museum (he built a “cottage” near the mansion for his family to live in so the collection could be displayed in the main house even before he opened it to the public), acquired some really lovely American crafts.  Much of the collection dates back to Colonial and Revolutionary times (Revere silver, for instance), and the last DuPont at Winterthur had a thing about George Washington so there’s a lot of Washingtoniana in the collection—both stuff Washington owned (a set of china, for instance) and stuff that depicts Washington (a number of portraits, including some folk-art likenesses).  According to our guide, DuPont was sort of obsessed with connecting his family to the founders of America because they first arrived here from France in the early 1800’s, after the Revolution and the founding of the nation.

I won’t detail all the various things in the house—that would sort of spoil a potential visit, and if you took a different tour, it would be irrelevant anyway.  There’s so much stuff, anyway, that it’s really the overall impression that remains.  There are a few remarkable items, however.  In one room that’s decorated in a Chinese motif, with furniture modeled after Chinese designs and fabrics, the wallpaper is a hand-painted Chinese paper from the 18th century.  DuPont found it unused in a warehouse someplace, having been imported then forgotten or abandoned for 150 years or so, and he bought it and installed it in this parlor.  The paper, however, was taller than the room.  Instead of trimming the paper as someone else might have done, though, DuPont raised the ceiling around the walls to accommodate the foot or so of extra paper height.  (He didn’t actually raise the whole ceiling, just created a sort of reverse trench—I think it’s called wainscoting, but I’m not sure.)  In another room—a kind of entrance gallery near the original front of the house (the main entrance was moved from one side to the other at some point during one remodeling), he installed a beautiful, graceful spiral staircase he shipped from a 19th-century North Carolina (I think—the south, anyway) home that was being demolished.  The kick is that he waited until he and his family were on a world cruise to have the stairs installed at Winterthur so it was a surprise for his family when they got home.  Better living through chemistry, indeed!

Aside from the mansion, there are acres and acres of landscaped grounds.  DuPont’s other interest was farming and gardening, and Winterthur had been a working dairy farm for most of its existence.  (The milk was reported to have been especially good, by the way.  And Winterthur even had its own railroad station to take the milk into Wilmington for sale.)  But the farm is no longer, of course, (though the railroad station is still standing) and the grounds are one garden or landscaped terrain after another.  DuPont planted flowers in such a way that something was always in bloom at any time of the year, and the trees are of many varieties, including some exotic species imported from places like Japan.  The basic entry ticket gets you into the garden, and there’s a half-hour tram ride around the grounds that’s included—a truly delightful treat on a spring or summer day.  You can also walk the grounds—there are trails and paths, and places to stop and sit—all planned by DuPont for his own enjoyment and that of his guests.  You can also dismount the tram at several places to poke around a children’s fantasy garden or some special area and then get back on—the driver will wait.  We did this ride at the end of our visit and it was a really nice way to end the day.  It was only unfortunate that we were there so early in the spring that most of the gardens weren’t in flower yet.

It is a peculiarity of the Winterthur set-up that though your tour admission is only good on the day you buy it (I don’t know if you can reserve in advance—you can the basic entry, obviously, since that’s what we had done), but the gallery-and-garden ticket, the basic admission thing, is good for two days, so you can come back the next day if you want.  We did that—instead of driving off to Chadds Ford immediately the next morning, we stopped at Winterthur—there’s a route to Chadds Ford that goes right by the estate entrance, so it’s not even off the route—to do the galleries, which, as I indicated, is the museum.  After the drive from D.C. and the tour of the mansion, we knew that we wouldn’t be able to trudge the galleries, see the garden—even on the tram—and check out the soup tureens (I’ll pick that up in a moment—I forgot it), so we took advantage of the return policy.  The galleries are exhibits of furniture-making and styles, painting techniques, and other craft work.  (There’s even an entire 19th-century furniture and clock workshop, house and all, from Long Island on display.)  There are also changing exhibits which are more or less interesting depending on what’s on and what you’re interested in.  There’s also a little film about life at Winterthur that’s interesting and kind of sorts out what you’ve seen (or will see, depending on the order of your visit).  

Now, that soup tureen exhibit: Believe it or not, it’s Campbell Soup’s collection of tureens.  It used to be at the Campbell factory in Camden, New Jersey, but when the factory closed, the collection was given to Winterthur and it’s housed in its own gallery off the terrace behind the mansion where the garden tram picks up and lets off passengers.  And believe it or not, it’s an interesting exhibit.  There are tureens from as early as the 18th century up to contemporary designs—both silver or gilt and porcelain.  Some are whimsical—a lot of animals—and some are truly elegant.  We checked this out while we were waiting for the garden tram, which worked out perfectly.  It’s a nice little lagniappe.

From Winterthur on the second visit, we drove along the two-lane highway north to Pennsylvania and Chadds Ford.  It’s a very pleasant drive, especially on a nice day.  (There are some strip malls at the beginning of the road—before Winterthur—but afterwards, it’s just countryside and little towns for the half hour to 45 minutes it takes.  It’s much nicer than either the Interstate, or the larger highway from Wilmington north to Pennsylvania we’d have taken if we hadn’t returned to Winterthur—which is all strip malls and fast-food outlets without respite.  And I suspect the driving time is the same, so why not take the pleasanter route?  

Obviously, a visit to the Wyeth museum is most interesting if you have an interest in the Wyeths’ art.  I don’t, really, but since I do have an interest in contemporary art in general, it was worth the short ride and a couple of hours stop along the way.  The Wyeth family is a phenomenon, of course: three generations of successful artists.  N.C. Wyeth (1882-1945) was most famous as an illustrator, especially of boys’ adventure books.  (His fortune, and the money with which he bought the Chadds Ford property, came from his illustrations for Treasure Island back in the early years of the last century.  His illustrations, for both books and magazine stories, are on display in one gallery, and many of the books are still in print with his pictures and cover art.  You can buy copies in the museum shop, wouldn’t ya know.)  Andrew (1917-2009), of course, was a big name in contemporary art for years, and he even made a big splash not long before his death with the Helga series—the portraits of his long-time model and mistress.  Andrew’s two sisters (Carolyn, 1909-94; Henriette, 1907-97) and their husbands (respectively: Franceso Joseph Delle Donne, 1919–2007; Peter Hurd, 1904-84) were far less well-known than he was, but they all had careers in art and some of their works are on display at the Brandywine River Museum, too.  Finally, Andrew’s son, Jamie (James, formally; b. 1946) is currently enjoying renown in the field, though not as great as his dad’s.  (He may be best known for a series of portraits he did of Nureyev—some of them were once exhibited at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts—for which he followed the dancer around for months or years and watched him perform and rehearse.  There’s a whole gallery of Jamie’s works, including many of the Nureyev paintings.) 

Most of the museum is devoted to the Wyeths, of course, but there are other galleries—it’s three stories high, with several galleries on each floor—one with Hudson River School works and one of other illustrators (in some cases with both the original drawing alongside the published version).  However, what makes the museum worth a short trip if you are at Winterthur anyway is that it’s such a lovely setting.  The museum is modern, built into the building that was N.C. Wyeth’s studio (and home, I believe), and the galleries are like spokes off a round corridor on each floor, but the place was a farm, so it’s surroundings are rural and wooded, with a creek that runs by the back of the museum.  The circular corridors are all glassed in with long expanses of windows looking out over the wooded creek, but more delightful is the little cafeteria (we arrived in time for a late lunch, which we had before viewing the galleries) which looks right out at the creek, near an old bridge, and there are several bronze sculptures reposing along the creek bank just below the cafeteria windows.  (Amusingly, the bronze sculptures are a cow and a pig—Miss Gratz by J. Clayton Bright, 1984, and Helen by André Harvey, 1989; the Wyeths weren’t sculptors.)  Even if you’re not particularly interested in the Wyeths’ painting, the Brandywine River Museum itself is a nice place to stop.  (You can even skip the galleries if you are really uninterested, and avoid paying the entrance fee—I don’t recall how much that was, since we booked the tix in advance through the motel in Wilmington—and just have lunch in the cafeteria and watch the creek roll by.)

The museum has a side tour to a nearby farm where Andrew painted, but we skipped that both because it was more than we wanted to see and because we were pretty touristed-out by then.  (Remember, we had stopped at Winterthur again on the way up.)  I gather there are a few—but not many—of his paintings there, too, but it’s mostly the old barn he painted (as a subject—he wasn’t a house-painter) and used as a studio that’s of tourist interest.  The art is all at the museum for the most part.  I wouldn’t recommend this as a trip in itself (unless, of course, you are a Wyeth fan—then definitely it’s worth a special trip), but it’s worth making what amounts to a stop on the way to or from New Jersey/New York if you go to Winterthur.  (As I think I indicated above, you can return to New Jersey without going past Winterthur and through Chadds Ford.  There are two routes: one is backtracking to I‑95 and getting back on the road across the Delaware Memorial Bridge and onto the Jersey pike; the other is to follow the U.S. highway—I think it’s 202, but I’d have to look at a map again to be sure—the road off 95 that takes you into Wilmington, north to U.S. 1 and going east (it’s designated “north” because 1 is a north-south road) across the Commodore Barry Bridge (across the Delaware River at Philly) and getting on the pike farther north than the Delaware Memorial.  (Chadds Ford is on U.S. 1—the museum is right off the road—but west/south of the intersection with the highway.  In other words, if you go the “scenic” route—that other highway is one strip mall after another—you also end up on U.S. 1, just a little further back.  It’s an insignificant distance, however.)

[Andrew Wyeth: Looking Out, Looking In runs from 4 May through 30 November at the National Gallery of Art, (202) 737-4215; www.nga.gov.]

“An Artist. A Town. Their Secrets.”

by Frances Stead Sellers

[In May 2004, my mother and I drove to New York City from Washington, D.C., by way of Winterthur, the DuPont homestead near Wilmington, Delaware, and Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, the home of the Brandywine River Museum, the Wyeth family art museum.  On 4 May of this year, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., will open Andrew Wyeth: Looking Out, Looking In, and the Washington Post ran this article on Andrew Wyeth, his artist family, and their relation with Chadds Ford, its people, and the farms and countryside around it.]

Five years after Andrew Wyeth’s death, stories about “America’s artist” still animate this little township at the intersection of Route 1 and the Brandywine River.

 

There’s the one about Wyeth painting a bonfire and picking up a piece of charred wood to take home to his studio, only to have it burst into flames in the back of his car.

 

The one about the evening he showed up, boyish-proud, at a friend’s dinner party, saying, “Look what I’ve got!” Out in the driveway sat a Stutz Bearcat — a celebrity sports car that he used to say he’d acquired in exchange for a painting.

 

There are stories about him flipping and rolling his snowmobile and fencing with friends in his studio; about outings with buxom mannequins and a party with a headless skeleton; about how he collected toy soldiers, ordered his burgers rare and had a hug like he wouldn’t let go.

 

And about how when he died, dozens of cameramen and reporters showed up where he ate at Hank’s Place, wanting to know what it was like when Andy (because he insisted on being called “Andy”) came in with his longtime model, Helga Testorf.

 

Waitresses and mechanics, friends and neighbors relive memories through bursts of affectionate laughter and sudden silences. For many characters in the dramas that played out in these few square miles of suburbanizing Southeastern Pennsylvania still live nearby, including Helga and Wyeth’s wife of almost seven decades, Betsy.

 

“When each of us who knew him pass away, it’s going to lose that character,” says Dorothy “Dee” Parker, a retired elementary school art teacher whom Wyeth painted.

 

But the process of transforming a living icon into a historical one is already well underway.

 

At 92, Betsy Wyeth, who managed the business side of her husband’s career, has yielded that job to staffers in the Wyeth office, who helped organize the show opening May 4 at the National Gallery with guidance from the couple’s two sons. Plans for what happens after Betsy dies to the thousands of works in her collection have not been unveiled. She has donated Wyeth’s studio to the Brandywine Conservancy and Museum of Art , which embraces her husband’s twin passions for art and the environment and is embarking on an ambitious program to educate people about the artwork and places he helped make famous.

 

Even as new generations are finding ways to continue what Wyeth stood for, there is the sense that the storytelling isn’t over, that his life, like the river he loved, contains secrets that are yet to surface from the undercurrents and backwaters.

 

Perhaps that’s not surprising for a man who exuded an aura of mystery and mischief and considered Halloween a favorite family holiday.

 

There was a “devilish” playfulness about him, according to Nancy Hoving, wife of Thomas Hoving, the late director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “He liked to have secrets,” Hoving recalls, “so he could reveal them.”

 

The most famous of those was Helga, the married German housekeeper and mother of four whom Wyeth painted repeatedly between 1970 and 1985. Although certain people, including Hoving, were aware he had been working with a German model, the extent of the collection — some 240 works, including many nudes — startled the art world and almost certainly Wyeth’s wife. The “Helga Pictures” were a publicity coup, making headlines and news magazine covers and prompting a 1987 show at the National Gallery.

 

Helga continued to play a role in Wyeth’s life. She was his studio assistant and, as he aged, his companion and caretaker. Wyeth’s studio became what his artist son, Jamie, has called Helga’s “domain,” full of chaos and clutter, unlike the spareness of the renovated mill where Betsy lives on the other side of Route 1. Helga would often eat with Wyeth at the counter at Hank’s Place, and she spent summers at a family place in Maine.

 

“Andy loved the game of keeping her out of sight or pretending she wasn’t there,” Hoving remembers.

 

For all the gossip that ensued, Wyeth was accepted and admired in this community. Spending time with him “was too much fun,” remembers Andy Bell, a close friend who did odd jobs for Wyeth and shared his love of pranks. He was “down-to-earth and a little rascal, too,” remembers Lloyd Lisk, another longtime friend.

 

Wyeth was “such a kind gentleman” — as Vicki Sylvester, a waitress at Hank’s Place, puts it — that he was welcomed into his neighbors’ modest homes to sketch and paint their cracked plaster walls and the windows that will be the focus of the National Gallery exhibit, “Andrew Wyeth: Looking Out, Looking In.”

 

“He was going into the houses of people who don’t have much money,” says Victoria Wyeth, the artist’s only grandchild. “You can’t be judgmental. They won’t invite you back.”

 

On the door of Wyeth’s studio, there’s a printed sign: “I am working, so please do not disturb. I do not sign autographs.”

 

Inside, the kitchen has been reconstructed to look as it did in the pre-Helga era of the 1950s, when the Wyeths lived there with their two young sons. There are toy soldiers on shelves, books in the library, a doll on a windowsill with her head broken off, and a human skeleton hanging in one corner. Strewn on the floor below Wyeth’s easel are copies of the many sketches he would make for each painting, smudged with footprints and dogs’ paw prints.

 

Visiting feels like intruding on the inner sanctum of this private painter — except, of course, that Wyeth is no longer here.

 

Visitors are welcome! Nosy strangers, come on in!

 

The business of breathing new life into the studio and surrounding landscape lies with Virginia Logan, who in 2012 took the top job of overseeing the Brandywine Conservancy and Museum of Art, succeeding someone who had worked there for 38 years. Logan, a lawyer with a corporate background and experience with nonprofits, represents new ambition for an organization that has already helped to preserve close to 60,000 acres of land and has an extensive art collection, as well as historic buildings, including Andrew Wyeth’s studio, his father N.C. Wyeth’s house and studio, and a farm less than a mile away where Wyeth frequently painted.

 

Logan wants to double the number of visitors to 200,000 a year. She plans to create walking trails and hands-on artistic and ecological experiences across the land. She aims to increase the institution’s international visibility, share the collection of some 4,000 works of art with broader audiences, spur young people’s interest in art and the environment, and take advantage of the proximity to attractions such as Longwood Gardens and Winterthur.

 

She hopes to do all this, she says, without losing the qualities that attracted the Wyeths here in the early 1900s.

 

Is there a tipping point in this balancing act of introducing people to places you are trying to preserve?

 

Logan’s response is considered, reflecting the competence and common sense that employees say she brought to the institution: “I think you’ll know it when you see it,” she says. “If the numbers impede the visitor experience, we’ll do something to address that, to keep the number of people at a level where they get a sense of place and not of being in a crowded place. We want to retain the magic.”

 

The first Wyeth to fall under that spell was Andrew’s father, Newell Convers Wyeth, who came to Chadds Ford as a student of Howard Pyle, founder of the Brandywine School. Pyle brought his proteges here for summers between 1898 and 1902 to work on the kind of narrative illustration of ad­ven­ture and romance that was popular in books and magazines of the era.

 

When N.C. decided to settle here, Chadds Ford combined historic resonance as the site of the largest land battle of the Revolutionary War with rustic simplicity and the sophistication of the du Ponts, who’d built gunpowder mills and grand chateaux along the Brandywine. It was a seductive mix that continues to attract tourists and new residents today.

 

Directly across Route 1 from the entrance to the Brandywine Battlefield is Ring Road. Drive a few hundred yards, down over Harvey Run and then up, and the road rises abruptly over a small hump. Ahead you can see a red bank barn and an austere white stucco farmhouse facing an open hillside — a sight familiar to anyone who knows Andrew Wyeth’s work. But pause atop the hump and on the left among the tangle of roadside weeds you can see two rods of rusting metal — the remains of the Octoraro branch line of the Pennsylvania Railroad. It was here in 1945 that N.C. Wyeth was killed in a screeching, bloody concertina of station wagon and locomotive. His 3-year-old grandson and namesake, Newell Convers Wyeth, who was in the car with him, also died.

 

Nobody knows what happened — whether the car stalled on the tracks or N.C. had a heart attack. A theory developed that N.C. had committed suicide, taking the child with him. Some even say the boy was actually his son — the product of an affair with one of his daughters-in-law. That rumor persists today.

 

For Andrew Wyeth, in his late 20s and the youngest of N.C.’s five children, the personal tragedy was a professional awakening that cemented his commitment to the countryside.

 

“When he died, I was just a clever watercolorist — lots of swish and swash,” Wyeth said in a Life magazine interview 20 years after N.C.’s death. “I had always had this great emotion toward the landscape, and so, with his death . . . the landscape took on a meaning — the quality of him.”

 

That meaning took form in “Winter 1946,” Wyeth’s depiction of a boy racing out of control down the hill you see from the railroad crossing, pursued by his own dark shadow. From then on, Wyeth haunted the farm, painting its German immigrant owners, Karl and Anna Kuerner; painting the water trough in the barn (“Spring Fed”); painting a simple table set in front of a window (“Groundhog Day”); and, in the farmhouse’s low attic room with meat hooks in the ceiling, painting Helga. Again and again.

 

No surprise that when the region was under threat of rapid industrialization in the 1960s, Wyeth supported his friend and du Pont descendant George “Frolic” Weymouth in creating the conservancy, and that four years later he and Betsy were instrumental in founding the art museum, in which he remained actively involved until his death.

 

Across Route 1 and on the other side of the river from the museum is Chadds Ford Elementary — the school Wyeth’s sons attended. On a dank late-March afternoon, Vic Wyeth, 35, has come in to address a class of fourth-graders, telling them stories about her grandfather and how he painted the landscape they are being raised in. She’s not an artist herself, and she doesn’t like to visit her grandfather’s studio now that it’s a museum. But she speaks the way you’d imagine Andrew Wyeth painting. Full of energy, with thrusts and parries, and a generous spatter of his aphorisms.

 

“Art has no rules.”

 

“Believe in yourself.”

 

“I live to paint.”

 

The children are transfixed; their hands shoot up.

 

“We have ‘Christina’s World’ at home!”

 

“My parents have six of his paintings!”

 

The prints of America’s artist adorn the homes of the people who’ve moved to “Wyeth Country,” some following jobs and some in search of a simpler way of life. The population of Chadds Ford has grown to more than 3,000, from 700 in 1930 when Wyeth was a teenager. The change is felt in the posh new housing and the strip malls of “shoppes.”

 

“It’s horrible,” Karl Kuerner III, grandson of the German immigrant farmers, says of the development.

 

“I once asked Andy about that,” he continues, “about what his father and my grandfather would have thought. And, he said, ‘They’d be rolling in their graves.’ ”

 

Kuerner, 57, has given away his inheritance to the conservancy — the red bank barn, the white stucco farmhouse and the land he loves but can no longer look after. His father, now 87, still bales the hay — not the big round bales that modern farmers make, but oblong bales tied with two rows of twine. Apart from the hay bales and a couple of Nubian goats, it’s no longer a working farm, though.

 

And Karl Kuerner III is not a farmer. He’s an artist, taught to paint by Andrew Wyeth’s sister Carolyn. He’s built himself a house on the hill with a studio on the top floor and a sweeping view down toward his grandparents’ place. An unfinished painting is propped on the easel. It shows his grandfather’s farm from the road, painted from the viewpoint of an outsider looking in.

 

There’s a poignancy to the scene, but Kuerner is philosophical, even excited about the change. “It would be a crime to see this place torn down and developed,” he says. “All along, it belonged to the art world,” he continues. As part of the conservancy and with Logan’s vision, the landscape will inspire future generations of artists, future members of the Brandywine School. Kuerner plans to teach art students at the farm this summer.

 

For all the obsession with Andrew Wyeth, his immense talent and prodigious output, the glamor and the mystery, five years after his death he is part of a much longer story.

 

“As time goes on, [the Wyeths] will be in your rearview mirror,” Kuerner says.

 

Their stories will be shaped by the facts we know and the ones that have yet to emerge.

 

You can’t see the little white house called Zum Edelweiss from Kuerner’s studio. It’s a walk away, over the crest of the hill and just up from the railroad tracks where N.C. was killed.

 

It’s where Helga and her husband settled after they came to Chadds Ford in the 1960s. And it’s where reporters showed up 30 years ago to hunt for her when the “Helga Pictures” hit the news. The house, one of three on a shared driveway, looks a little unlived-in these days, though there’s a newish barn back there as well as a couple of cars and three white storage pods.

 

Now in her 70s, Helga sometimes shows up at the museum for lunch. But she rarely talks to reporters and didn’t respond to a phone call or a letter. Like the man who painted her, she is offered the kind of privacy this small town still affords.

 

“We always buffered them,” says Voula Skiadas, owner of Hank’s Place.

 

That doesn’t stop the speculation. Helga is known for taking notes, and some believe she’s writing a book. Others say she paints, and there is a 1988 Wyeth watercolor titled “Helga Painting,” though it’s not clear from the pose whether she is actually painting or perhaps reading.

 

Helga saves things, people say: She had to clear her clutter from the studio building before the museum took over, and she spends a lot of time sorting and storing it.

 

Lloyd Lisk, Wyeth’s old friend, helped her move, packing hats and shoes, news clippings and photos, magazines and books, from the kitchen, the basement, the upstairs. “A real potpourri,” he says. “Box after box after box.”

 

Helga is something of “a conservateur as far as Andy was concerned,” Lisk says. And then — like many other people who knew Wyeth well — he pauses.

 

“I’m not going to tell you all the secrets,” he says.

 

[The above article was originally published in the “Arts & Style” section (Section E) of the Washington Post on 27 April 2014.  Andrew Wyeth: Looking Out, Looking In runs from 4 May through 30 November at the National Gallery of Art, (202) 737-4215; www.nga.gov.

 

*  *  *  *

“FROM WYETH, WINDOWS THAT LOOK IN ON A PRISON”

by Philip Kennicott

 

[After the Wyeth show at the National Gallery opened, the customary review of the exhibit came out in the Washington Post; I think it’s well worth completing this venture into the world of Andrew Wyeth by posting that notice. The review was originally published in the “Style” section (sec. C) of the Post on 28 May 2014.]

 

Visitors to the National Gallery of Art’s “Andrew Wyeth: Looking Out, Looking In” are greeted by a masterpiece, the artist’s 1947 “Wind from the Sea,” which structures the whole exhibition. The theme is windows, their recurrence as icon in the painter’s oeuvre, their personal and sometimes hermetic meanings as metaphor, and the larger tension they set up between representation and abstraction in the some 60 paintings, watercolors and drawings on view.

 

Critics have been hating on Wyeth, who died in 2009, for at least a half-century, and much of the venom was fueled by art-world ideology. Wyeth committed at least two unpardonable sins, hewing to a realist style during an age of abstraction and irony, and achieving extraordinary popular success. One prominent detractor famously dubbed him “our greatest living ‘kitsch-meister.’ ”

 

“Wind from the Sea” makes it impossible to accept those reflexive judgments, but taken together with the other works in this exhibition, it doesn’t make it much easier to love Wyeth’s body of work. Admire? Absolutely. But the art remains emotionally and often visually monochromatic, even monomaniacal. Wyeth gives us window after window — meticulous and virtuoso renderings — and yet the exhibition feels claustrophobic. Despite the subtitle, “Looking Out, Looking In,” the effect is entirely the latter, it’s all looking in, and the in we are scrutinizing is strangely dreary and defeated.

 

“Wind from the Sea” was painted in the ramshackle, 18th-century house of Christina and Alvaro Olson, siblings and friends of Wyeth’s who lived on the coast of Maine. Wyeth was in an abandoned third-floor room of their house, looking out to the sea, when the wind suddenly rustled the tattered remains of a sheer curtain. Crocheted birds on the lacy fabric were caught momentarily in flight, and the painting is uncanny in its evocation of a numinous, fleeting instant of motion. Wyeth made a quick sketch, on the same sheet of paper on which he had been drawing Christina Olson.

 

Olson, a stoical, dignified woman who was disabled by polio, was a friend of Wyeth’s wife. She is referenced in the title of Wyeth’s most celebrated work, “Christina’s World,” which depicts a thin woman lying on parched grass, looking up a low rise to an old farmhouse. Wyeth admired her strength, and she became a frequent subject, or inspiration of his work. “You see before you the power of the queen of Sweden sitting there,” he once said of the woman of modest means from a remote stretch of Maine. Wyeth also said that “Wind from the Sea,” which is devoid of any tangible human presence, was a portrait of Christina.

 

It is likely that it was many more things as well. The diaphanous birds are a spectral presence, and if you study the way the lacy curtain evaporates into the bottom left of the picture, you see clearly that this is not strictly a realist or purely representational painting. Wyeth’s miraculous rendering of the main body of the fluttering curtain disintegrates into mere streaks of white paint; it is not a representation of a fraying curtain, but a frayed representation of a curtain. The fabric becomes a scrim seen against the hard, straight lines of the window frame, and one feels instantly certain that Wyeth aims to capture the disintegration of something far more profound than textile in the breeze.

 

You may wonder, perhaps, whether the delicate but rather cheap birds on the curtain represent the dissipating world of representational art, whether we are meant to feel the artist trapped within something that feels both like home and a prison, too, whether the moment captured is a self-conscious one: A man of immense talent, locked in the past, greatly skilled at weaving illusions that are no longer in fashion, suddenly wondered what he was doing, what his life would be about.

 

Perhaps it’s too speculative to connect all those dots, but the dots are certainly there throughout the rest of the exhibition, which feels locked in perpetual autumn or winter, preoccupied with isolation and decay, with windows and doors seemingly more about enclosing haunted interiors than revealing light and life out of doors. In one particularly effective 1962 watercolor, “The British at Brandywine,” a toy soldier with a few hints of red about his uniform turns his back on his peers and seems to stride resolutely toward a dark precipice. Who is that meant to be?

 

The curators of the exhibition emphasize the degree to which Wyeth is engaged with abstraction throughout these works. Wood, walls, grass, cracked plaster, rumpled bed linens, distant hills, and patches of sky are all rendered with great freedom, and if you put your nose close to the energetic confusion of paint in these parts of the image, you might believe you are witnessing small-scale irruptions of the more radical ideas that were in vogue in New York art circles at the time. But it is always contained, and often it is the geometry of the window that seems to keep it at bay.

 

This limited flirtation with messy gestures and abstract dynamism is rather like the use of atonality in Hollywood soundtracks, for dramatic effect and color, but not integral to the larger purpose of the work. And while Wyeth can be rather daring in these little sallies outside of the representational comfort zone, there are some rules he will never break.

 

Light and shadow, for example. No matter how far he pushes some ideas, no matter how much he bends the rules, he will never forgo a strict treatment of the play of light and shadow in these rooms, and across the forms contained therein. Illumination, so often the thrill of his greatest paintings, begins to feel like an obsession, or entrapment, as you see more and more of his lesser ones.

 

The exhibition is designed to drive the viewer deeper into Wyeth’s technique, his variations and elaboration of recurring themes and subjects. But the cumulative reductionism of his work, the austerity of its dun-colored palette, dulls the mind more than it sharpens the eye. Compare the experience of looking at a lot of Wyeth with looking at Barnett Newman’s “Stations of the Cross,” a series of purely abstract paintings in black and white, made more than a decade later. Both are hermetic. But the cumulative impact of Newman’s work drives one deeper into its small variations and details while giving a sense of transparency to something beyond.

 

Wyeth, who banished modernity and people from these paintings, drives you away from his own work, and leaves you feeling entirely shut into the gallery space, and shut out of his life. There is a masterpiece here, but it remains as cold and isolated as the Maine coast on which it was made.

 

[In a few days, I’ll post my archival report on the 2004 visits to Winterthur and The Brandywine Museum.  ROTters are invited to come back to catch this companion article.]

'Cock'

I paid a visit to my mother in Bethesda, Maryland, in May and while I was there she and her theater companion had seats for a performance at Studio Theatre in the District, a theater I’ve attended and written about on a number of occasions (“Venus in Fur (Studio Theatre, Washington, D.C.),” 11 July 2011; “Torch Song Trilogy,” 5 October 2013; “That Hopey Changey Thing,” 15 December 2013).  I think it’s one of the city’s best troupes and the acting there is always superior, even if I occasionally haven’t cared for the choice of material.  This production was Cock, a British play by Mike Bartlett, which was reviewed in the Washington Post just a few days after I arrived in town and Peter Marks gave it an unqualified rave.  We  saw the matinee performance on Saturday, 31 May, in the little Milton Theatre at Studio’s Logan Circle home on 14th Street, N.W.  The production, which opened on 18 May after starting previews on the 14th, is part of Studio Theatre’s New British Invasion Festival; the production is scheduled to close on 22 June. 

Cock, whose title refers simultaneously (or serially, perhaps) to the male sex organ, the British colloquialism for “someone who can’t get anything right,” and cockfighting as a metaphor for the combative scenes of Bartlett’s play, débuted at the Royal Court Theatre in London in 2009.  It played at the Duke Theatre in New York City in 2012 (in a presentation, whose title was The Cockfight Play for advertising and PC purposes—and in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal—staged by the London director, James Macdonald, and co-produced by the Royal Court) and has been produced in Chicago, Philadelphia, Houston, Dallas, Key West, Coral Gables, Toronto, Melbourne, and Bangalore, among other locales.  The plot’s the complex story of John, who’s in a several-year relationship with a man, called simply M, yet suddenly finds himself attracted and maybe in love with a woman, W.  In a world newly rife with choices, John has to confront his at a climactic (if you will) dinner cooked by M who’s invited not only W but his father, F.  Saying Cock concerns “categorisations,” the playwright has acknowledged, “It's about sex and sexuality, fighting, falling in love, and getting things wrong.”  In the words of Variety’s London reviewer, David Benedict, Cock “is like watching [Noel Coward’s] Private Lives on fast-forward, albeit . . . with saltier language.”

Bartlett, 33, is from Oxford and has been writing plays for the Royal Court since 2007 (My Child), where he’s been a member of the prestigious Young Writers.  He’d previously written Comfort for the Old Vic’s New Voices 24 Hour Plays in 2005 and his radio play Not Talking was broadcast by the BBC in 2007; Bartlett’s also written for television (The Town, a 2012 crime series on ITV1).  Cock won the 2010 Olivier Award for Outstanding Achievement In An Affiliate Theatre and his 2013 play Bull received the National Theatre Award for Best New Play; he’s won a passel of other awards and honors in his short career already.  Bartlett was Writer-In-Residence at the National Theatre in 2011 and his most recent work includes the 2014 plays An Intervention and King Charles III, a “future history play” in verse which speculates on the reign of the current Prince of Wales. 

Bartlett says he became interested in theater at 16 when he saw Mark Ravenhill’s Shopping and Fucking (Royal Court Upstairs, 1996), remarking that it was “the first time I’d seen a play by a writer that wasn’t dead, or wasn’t much older.”  The Studio program states, “Much of his early work is stripped of almost all theatrical trappings—set, costumes, and props—and leans on the spectacle and surprise of argument, of the brutality of competition played out linguistically among his characters.”   On the website WhatsOnStage.com British reviewer Michael Coveney, writing about My Child in 2007, said, “What I like about Bartlett’s play is its simplicity and starkness, its realization that to make good theatre you can pare right down to basics and raw emotions, and honest dissections of relationships, like you can lacerate them.”  Stressing the “theatricality of the contemporary world,” Bartlett’s work “strips theatre of its preciousness.”  “Theatre has to appeal to people who do jobs and have lives,” says Bartlett.  Instead of writing plays “thinking about other plays,” he insists the writer should “look out the window and say, my play is about that—whatever the world is, that’s what I’m after.”

With a reputation for finding dramatic forms to address our changing reality, evident in Cock, Bartlett’s plays often deal with the symbols of modern life: widescreen TV’s, tablets, iPhones (not so evident in Cock).  Characters Tweet, text, and check social media; they go clubbing or grab a coffee at Starbucks.  But Bartlett has more on his mind than seeding his scripts with the latest computer products and pastimes.  He says he wants “to find a theatre that can reflect that [computerized] landscape . . . forms that represent what it feels like to live now.”  The incipient dramatist thought, “I don’t understand why all plays aren’t like this.  Why are so many plays set in the past?”  His earliest experiments with playwriting blended “modernity with tradition.” 

His work is also political, but not polemical, confronting such topics as the British involvement in Iraq, the baby boomer generation, corporate corruption, and complacency over climate change.  Along with contemporary subjects and themes, Bartlett is considered an innovator with form as well, sometimes borrowing techniques from TV and film.  The press consistently labels him “one of Britain['s] hottest young playwrights,” “one of the most exciting new talents to emerge in recent times,” “one of the UK's most exciting and inventive young writers,” and other similar encomiums.  Even David Muse, Studio’s artistic director and the production’s stage director, dubbed the writer “Britain’s most exciting young contemporary playwright.”  His plays, however, except for Cock and 2008’s Contractions, which was produced in 2013 by Studio (which also presented a reading of Bartlett’s 2013 Bull on 2 June), don’t seem to have had wide exposure in the U.S.  (At any rate, I was unfamiliar with Bartlett’s name or his work before this presentation.) 

Cock is a peculiar play dramaturgically, which I gather is a trademark of Bartlett’s writing.  It could be a radio script (which we’ve seen the dramatist writes)—you could easily close your eyes and get a pretty full experience of the play.  Stripped, as the program notes of most of the playwright’s work, of “theatrical trappings,” there are no props or set pieces (there is a set, which I’ll get to presently), and Alex Jaeger’s costuming is appropriate but hardly revealing.  (Though the play covers several weeks of the lives of John, M, and W, they never change clothes, which is in line theatrically with the propless staging.)  Colin K Bills’s lighting is stark and monochromatic—bright white spotlights, with a huge, square fluorescent fixture illuminating the central playing area with its cold, characterless light which all black out between scenes but otherwise never change intensity.  (There’s enough light in the house to read the program or check your watch if you like.)  It’s the illumination of a sports arena—think night baseball or football for an appropriate image—not the emotionally charged atmosphere of a dramatic reenactment of lives in turmoil; there are no shadows.  None of this would be sorely missed in a radio performance; the only true deficit would be the actors’ appearances, especially their facial expressions.  You could probably manage without that, but it would be a loss.

The play’s setting is a dirt-covered ring, which I presume is meant to resemble a cockfighting ring.  (I wouldn’t know: I’ve never seen a real one.)  The lighting is also part of this image.  The Milton’s small amphitheater stage, which is circular anyway, is backed by a raw-plywood arc with two doorways cut into it and matching wooden benches built in all along its length.  When a character is “off” (that is, say, in another room but still present), the actor may take a seat on the bench.  Occasionally, they take swigs of bottled water like fighters or wrestlers between rounds (and, I’d bet, because the actors need to wet their whistles in this performance that keeps everyone talking for 95 minutes straight).  Everything—the wood and the dirt—is monochromatic.  (The floor surrounding the dirt ring is white, but that’s no-man’s land: it’s not part of the play’s reality.)  In the program, an illustration shows what looks like a bull ring, and I assume this image is also part of the environment Bartlett, Muse, and set designer Debra Booth want to evoke. 

After each scene, staged like a sort of verbal sumo-wrestling bout, a buzzer sounds (sound design is by James Bigbee Garver) and the actors change positions in the circle—sometimes switching sides completely, sometimes just shifting a foot or two one way or another, and occasionally “shaking it out,” like athletes getting ready for another round.  (As if to carry out the sumo analogy, in one early scene, M essentially backs John to the edge of the ring until John has to quickly dodge around M to avoid stepping off the circle and “losing” the round.)  Since the actors carry no props, all action of the realistic sort is imaginary.  I don’t mean mimed or indicated—it’s left up to us to “see” what the characters are doing, with occasional brief suggestions from the dialogue.  (“Can I have more wine?”  “There.”  But no one holds up a “glass” or tilts a “bottle.”  See?  Radio play.)  Even the sex is imaginary in the same vein—with suggestive sound effects from the actors, however.  No one disrobes or even goes through the motions, even when M does a strip for John.  (The kissing is real—the rest isn’t.  Neither is any violence, such as a slap.)  I found this very interesting theatrically, and it intrigues me as a technique, but it was also a little off-putting, especially in the beginning before the convention became established. 

With so little to do on stage, the actors have to work extra hard with their bodies to put some physical life into Bartlett’s slightly expressionistic dialogue.  I can tell you from experience, acting without props and business is among the hardest work an actor has to undertake on stage (right next to doing nothing at all, possible the hardest job for an actor to do well).  The set’s innate restrictiveness—what can you do in a dirt circle, after all?—means that the cast has to rely an awful lot on their faces, and the Studio cast does a marvelous job of this.  Rarely do they mug or over-articulate an expression (it did happen here and there), but all four of the actors (Ben Cole as John, Scott Parkinson as M, Liesel Allen Yaeger as W, and Bruce Dow as F—and, by the way, except for John, these designations only appear in the program, not in the dialogue) really pulled off this difficult assignment, fleshing out the characters—as much as Bartlett’s script allows them to.  I have to add that Parkinson has an extraordinarily special asset for this work: he has the most intense eyes I’ve seen on any stage recently.  They can be ordinary, no more expressive than any good actor’s, then suddenly get piercing and hard, like a hawk’s. 

As I watched the early scenes of Cock, I quickly noticed that Bartlett doesn’t actually write realistic speech.  Despite his claim to write about the world as it really is, his people don’t really speak like you and me and the folks we all know.  (Of course, neither did Tennessee Williams’s characters, Chekhov’s, Ibsen’s, Shaw’s, or Lanford Wilson’s.  It’s deceptive.)  Now, I don’t mean he sounds like Pinter or Ionesco, or Shakespeare or Marlowe.  You can be fooled for a time into thinking Bartlett’s people talk like ordinary Brits—but it won’t last for long.  (By the way, the accents slipped now and then—the dialect coach is Ashley Smith—and its region is ambiguous, but that turned out to be inconsequential.  The script could even be Americanized without harm, I think.)  But I couldn’t put my finger on what they were doing—until I finally decided to concoct my own literary style to describe what the playwright writes: expressionistic realism.  If lyric realism, what Williams wrote, is a heightened, poetic form of speech that sounds like real conversation but isn’t, then expressionistic realism is speech that seems ordinary but is more endowed with open emotion, exposed nerves than what most people utter.  Of course, this can get Bartlett’s characters into a lot of trouble—emotional honesty, no matter how elegantly expressed, is perilous.  I gather, especially if Cock is at all emblematic of Bartlett’s dramaturgy, that this is what the dramatist intends for his plays—to court danger, to test the waters of modern society, with its pitfalls and bear traps, and see how we survive, falter, cope, or founder. 

In Cock, none of the characters come out of their honesty particularly whole, no one gets what he or she wants, much less needs.  In fact, none of them ever learn what they need, let alone how to get it.  And it’s not as if they deserve to fail—no one’s venal here—it’s just not possible in Bartlett’s world for them to find happiness—or even mere satisfaction.  I guess Bartlett’s lesson (is that a terrible word?) is that in this modern world of choices and possibilities, making the right one just isn’t achievable.  It’s not just a matter that any given decision means someone gets hurt.  Every decision means everyone gets hurt—especially the chooser.  Cock starts out as a serio-comedy, with plenty of laughter (some of it embarrassed), and ends up a near tragedy: no one’s dead, but everyone’s soul is mortally wounded.

If that doesn’t daunt you, then you’re likely to like Bartlett’s play.  If it does, you should probably stay away, because Cock has a fairly painful outcome—and Bartlett offers no spoonful of sugar to help his medicine go down.  (Sorry.  I just saw Saving Mr. Banks.)  You are forewarned.

The Washington area press (I didn’t survey the London, New York, or other regional reviews) seemed fairly unanimous in its praise for Bartlett’s short play.  As I said at the outset of this report, Peter Marks pretty much raved about the play and Studio’s production in the Post.  Calling the play a “sizzling seriocomedy of straight-gay indecision,” the Post reviewer wrote, “You feel at certain knuckle-gnawing moments . . . that something is about to explode.”  The play “has the potential to propel us into the realm of the simple-minded rom-com,” Marks warned.  “But this crackling play, staged with acerbic brio at Studio Theatre by the ace director David Muse, is a far slyer work” that “falls enjoyably into line with the best drama created by other astute relationship-probers, such as Neil Labute.”  The Post writer concluded that “Muse and company bring this provocative argument to an intriguing boil.”  In the Examiner, Kyle Osborne dubbed Cock a “whip smart play” in which the lead actors are “displaying non-stop foot work that a heavyweight champ would envy.”  Osborne, however, objected that John’s “indecision will drive you crazy, mainly because Bartlett hasn’t shown us why these two smart and attractive people would put up with his bullshit.”  The Examiner review-writer acknowledged, though, that “what fun it is watching these characters throw words across the stage at each other like poisoned-tipped spears,” even as “the whole play merges into Farce” in the final scene (a characterization with which I don’t agree).  Reminding us, “You don’t have to like the characters in order to enjoy a play,” Osborne quipped that John’s indecision drove the reviewer to the point where he “was going to rush the stage and grab him by the lapels,. . . shouting, ‘Dude, just make up your f*cking mind!.’”  (That’s the Examiner’s asterisk, not mine; they used it in the play’s title, too.) 

Ian Buckwalter of Washington City Paper called Bartlett’s play “often hilarious,” the production of which at Studio is “a cockfight with M and W as preening roosters both looking to rule John’s roost.”  Buckwalter complained that John’s “paralysis is the play’s greatest hurdle, because Bartlett is trying to build an emotional narrative around a character who is unable to connect with his feelings,” making the character “maddening to watch.”  The reviewer for WCP added, however, that this is “a hurdle that Bartlett’s quick-witted style easily clears.  Even in the midst of crippling his protagonist, one can sense the playwright in the center of the ring, slyly asking, are you not entertained?”  Warning that “we need to have a firm grip on the arms of our seats, because we are in for an emotional ride,” Chuck Conconi called Cock a “tough, acerbic play” in Washington Life Magazine.  He noted the “minimalism” of both Bartlett’s writing and Muse’s direction, but also pointed out, “While mesmerizing, Bartlett’s play is painful to experience,” yet also “the kind of life-defining experience we understand and maybe even have experienced.”

On the website DC Theatre Scene, Jayne Blanchard dubbed Cock a “pugilistic, punch-drunk comedy . . . that sears you with snark while ripping your heart out.”  On the set she likens to a “Spartan arena,” Blanchard saw “three people peck and claw through this raw examination of power plays, the mystery of attraction, sexual orientation and responsibility” which is “sharpened by David Muse’s forceful direction.”  In his MD Theatre Guide notice, Elliot Lanes characterized Cock as “a thought-provoking evening of theatre” with “four great actors and a superb staging.” 

“Smart” and “bold,” Cock, said Sydney-Chanele Dawkins on DC Metro Theater Arts, is “a fresh twist on the modern day love triangle” and a “remarkable achievement of a play” of “absorbing writing” and “honesty.”  Bartlett’s “substantive amusingly, clever play,” wrote Dawkins, “is a refreshing exercise in new growth theatre” that’s “a transgressive, no-holds-barred, minimalistic, theatrical adventure to the wild side of sexual politics, competition and word slay.”  With “deft direction,” the production provides “a thrilling rollercoaster ride that not only demands your attention, it will engage and surprise you.”  Concluding that “Cock is a sharp, ripe experience,” Dawkins affirmed that Bartlett’s “incisive” play “pulls no punches.”  A few days later on the same website, John Stoltenberg promised that if he were writing “a theater review it would be an effusive rave.”  (Okay, I’m not sure what the cyber writer thought he was composing here.  Maybe like me, he figures it’s a “report.”  Fair enough.)  The production of the “riveting, tense, tightly wound script,” said the DCMT writer, is “impeccable,” all the elements “flawless.”  “I cannot recall the last time I left the theater having watched a play I found so brilliant and unnerving at the same time,” declared Stoltenberg, immersed as he was in “the extraordinary emotional/relational contest that Bartlett has devised here.”  Though “loaded with substance and insights,” the script “actually plays as a scintillating comedy.”  In the end, Stoltenberg warned, “you walk outside afterward gobsmacked by great theater.” 

I haven’t made up my mind about Bartlett yet, except to say that I want to check him out a little more.  I’m also curious where he’ll go next.  One reviewer here, Peter Marks, compared him with Neil LaBute, but LaBute’s a writer for whom I’ve never developed a fondness, so I can’t make the same assessment.  I have to reserve judgment and say only that I find Bartlett an intriguing and provocative possibility for now, someone I’ll want to watch.  I need more evidence.  I’m not even sure if I liked Cock or just found it interesting and stimulating.  If that’s inconclusive and wishy-washy on my part, then so be it.

The Thomas Jefferson Memorial

Of all the monuments in my home town of Washington, D.C., my favorite is the Thomas Jefferson Memorial, probably one of the least well-known of all the historical markers in the Nation’s Capital.  (I suspect the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial on Theodore Roosevelt Island in the Potomac is less renowned; I didn’t even know it was there myself until maybe 15 years ago.)  It’s not the man to whom the monument’s dedicated, our third president, though he was a favorite historical figure of my father’s, but the combination of its design and its setting that appeals to me.  This is principally an aesthetic preference, not a historical or philosophical one—though I harbor admiration for Jefferson’s political philosophy as well.

Sometimes compared with the much more famous Lincoln Memorial, I suppose because they’re both modeled on classical Greco-Roman temples, the Jefferson Memorial is much less imposing than its larger cousin.  At 27,336 square feet, the Lincoln Memorial, in the form of a Greek Doric temple, is 204 feet long, 134 feet wide, and 99 feet tall, surrounded by 36 44-foot-tall columns.  The Jefferson Memorial, on a little over 18 acres of ground, is 165 feet in diameter (about 519 feet around) and 129 feet high, with 26 Ionic columns around it.  Though taller than the Lincoln, the Jefferson Memorial building is about 22,000 square feet in area.  It’s smaller in scale than the Lincoln, like a miniature, and the architecture is just as elegant.  Because it’s round, it seems more graceful and less boxy, and, open to the air all around, it appears lighter and airier than the enclosed marble structure of the Lincoln Memorial.  To my eye, the Jefferson Memorial is more “18th century” and the Lincoln is more “19th century,” even though they were both built in more or less the same era (the Lincoln Memorial was dedicated in 1922; the Jefferson in 1943). 

The Jefferson Memorial is less popular (annual visitation is around 2.3 million) than the Lincoln (3.6 million visitors a year) largely because of its location next to the Tidal Basin along the banks of the Potomac River in what is designated as East Potomac Park; it’s not far from National Mall and is directly South of the Washington Monument and the White House.  (The T. R. Memorial gets as few as 112,000 visitors a year.  Few people even know it’s there, much less how to reach it.)  Ironically, the Jefferson Memorial is fourth on the List of America's Favorite Architecture compiled by the American Institute of Architects (after the Empire State Building, the White House, and the National Cathedral); the Lincoln Memorial is seventh.  While the Lincoln Memorial is essentially set in a busy traffic circle (before 1976, you used to be able to drive around its circumference along Lincoln Memorial Circle), the Jefferson Memorial is sited somewhat obscurely on the south bank of the Tidal Basin, surrounded by the cherry trees that were a gift to the people of Washington from the people of Tokyo in 1912 (see my blog article, “Washington’s Cherry Blossoms,” 9 April 2012) and the George Mason Memorial Garden.  Encircled by a grove of trees, it’s especially beautiful during Cherry Blossom season in the spring, when both the cherry blossoms around the Tidal Basin and the flowers in the garden are in bloom.  There’s no lovelier sight in the Capital than the little, round Jefferson Memorial with the Tidal Basin before it glimpsed through a curtain of cherry blossoms.  (You can also get a unique view of the memorial if you rent a paddle boat in the Tidal Basin.  The boathouse, open from March to September, is right opposite the memorial.)

The Jefferson Memorial was the third monument on the National Mall in honor of a past president.  The Washington Monument, an Egyptian Revival obelisk designed by architect Robert Mills, is dedicated to the first President of the United States, George Washington, completed in 1884.  The Lincoln Memorial, the Greek Revival Doric temple designed by Henry Bacon, honors Abraham Lincoln, our 16th president and was dedicated in 1922.  The Thomas Jefferson Memorial commemorates the statesman, architect, eloquent and prolific writer, inventor, and farmer who drafted of the Declaration of Independence, and advised on the Constitution of the United States.  Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), aside from being the third President of the United States (1801-1808), had been the second Vice President (under John Adams, 1797-1801) and the first U.S. Secretary of State (in Washington’s cabinet, 1790-93).  As the primary author of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson had been a Delegate to the Continental Congress from the Colony of Virginia (1775-76).  Later he served as the second Governor of the Commonwealth of Virginia (1779-1781).  From 1785 to 1789, he served as Minister to France under the Articles of Confederation (before the adoption of the Constitution).  In 1819, Jefferson established the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, which he also conceived and designed.  An architect who had designed his own home in Monticello, Virginia, he also anonymously submitted plans for both the U.S. Capitol building and the White House.  At Monticello, his plantation, he experimented as a planter who started the wine industry in Virginia.  Jefferson was an accomplished musician (violin and cello) and a voracious reader whose private library, nearly 6,500 books, formed the basis of what became the Library of Congress (after the original collection had been destroyed in 1814 by the British in the War of 1812).  Jefferson was also an inventor who devised the polygraph, the pedometer, an enciphering machine, a clock that ran on the Earth’s gravity, wire coat hangers, swivel chairs, and sliding doors. 

(I don’t overlook the troublesome aspects of Jefferson’s biography, notably his slave ownership and his affair with Sally Hemings, a slave in his household.  They just have no place in this article about his memorial in Washington.  There were also controversies and complaints about the memorial and its design, including the selection and editing of some of the quoted passages inscribed in its interior, but the coverage of those details of this history is readily available elsewhere.)  Jefferson died on 4 July 1826, the 50th anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence; his death preceded that of John Adams, his great political rival whom he served as vice president, by 5½ hours.  (Jefferson and Adams are the only two U.S. presidents to die on the same day, though Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson came pretty close: 26 December 1972 and 22 January 1973, respectively.)

Proposals for some significant monument on the site of the present-day Jefferson Memorial were raised from the turn of the 20th century on, the location being so inviting for something important.  The first concrete proposal was for a memorial to Theodore Roosevelt, made in 1925, but the plans were never funded by Congress and the monument was never built.  In 1934, President Franklin Roosevelt, an admirer of Jefferson, made inquiries about a memorial to the third president and Congress created the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Commission and appropriated $3 million (about $52½ million today) for the project.  In 1935, the commission chose John Russell Pope (1874-1937; National Archives, completed in 1935; West Building of the National Gallery of Art, 1941) as the architect.  As Jefferson was a supporter of Neoclassicism, Pope planned a structure in the president’s honor modeled after the dome-like Pantheon in Rome, which was also the basis for Jefferson’s design of the Rotunda of the University of Virginia. 

Pope died in 1937, but construction of the memorial began in 1938 anyway under his surviving partners, Daniel P. Higgins and Otto R. Eggers.  FDR laid the cornerstone of the Thomas Jefferson Memorial in 1939, the same year the memorial commission held a competition to select the sculptor for the commemorative statue inside the monument.  In 1941, Rudulph Evans (1878-1960) was commissioned to sculpt the statue of Thomas Jefferson and Adolph A. Weinman (1870-1952) was chosen to carve the pediment relief above the entrance.  Though the statue wouldn’t be completed for four more years, President Roosevelt dedicated the Jefferson Memorial on 13 April 1943, the 200th anniversary of Jefferson's birth.  A temporary statue, made of plaster painted to resemble bronze (because of metal shortages during World War II) was installed.  The final bronze casting, 19 feet tall and standing on a 6-foot-high triangular pedestal of black Minnesota granite, was erected in 1947 (after the wartime restrictions on using metals were lifted).  

The statue of Jefferson, which weighs five tons, gazes out at the White House.  The standing image represents the Age of Enlightenment and depicts Jefferson as a philosopher and statesman in midlife.  At the back of the sculpture, at its base, the hem of Jefferson’s fur-collared coat, a gift from his close friend (and hero of the American Revolution), the Polish General Tadeusz Kościuszko (1746-1817), drapes over ears of corn because he was a farmer and a book to represent his scholarship; in his left hand is the Declaration of Independence because he was its principal author.  In addition to the statue, five engraved quotations from Jefferson’s writings adorn the interior of the memorial, including passages from “A Summary View of the Rights of British America,” 1774; the Declaration of Independence, 1776; “A Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom,” 1777; and Notes on the State of Virginia, 1785.  The passages were selected to illustrate the principles to which Jefferson dedicated his life.  The pedimental sculpture group carved by Weinman is the Drafting the Declaration of Independence, a relief depicting Jefferson standing behind a table around which are seated Benjamin Franklin of Pennsylvania, John Adams of Massachusetts, Roger Sherman of Connecticut, and Robert Livingston of New York, as they present the draft the Declaration to the Continental Congress.  The memorial’s interior is illuminated at night, making a striking sight as you drive past on the “ring road” along the Tidal Basin.

The Neoclassical monument consists of circular marble steps, a portico, a circular colonnade of Ionic columns, and a shallow dome.  The circular, colonnaded Neoclassic structure was introduced to the U.S. by Jefferson.  The memorial is constructed of stones chosen not for their aesthetic appeal alone but also for their historical implications.  To symbolize the geographic extremes of the original thirteen colonies, the exterior stonework is Vermont marble from New England while the inside walls are white Georgia marble from the Deep South.  Inside the structure are stones from the growing Union: the floor is Tennessee marble and the inner dome is Indiana limestone.  (Tennessee and Indiana became states in 1796 and 1816, respectively.)  President Jefferson is tied historically to the Louisiana Purchase (1803), so his statue stands on a block of Minnesota granite with a gray Missouri marble ring surrounding its base.  (Minnesota and Missouri were admitted to the Union in 1858 and 1821, in that order.)    

Few alterations have been made to the Jefferson Memorial since the bronze statue was installed, but in early 2006, signs of potentially serious trouble began to appear in the monument’s structure.  When the memorial was built, it was constructed on pilings and caissons driven into a man-made mud flat, reclaimed from the marshland along the banks of the Potomac River to accommodate the monument’s construction.  A section of the sea wall that separates the 32,000-ton monument from the Tidal Basin was breaking away and sinking into the artificial inlet.  Other parts of the foundation and surrounding terrain also appeared to be shifting.  (The Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Korean War Veterans Memorials are also built on pilings set in landfill.  Those monuments, however, haven’t shown any signs of settling.)  By 2013, the slippage was measured at almost a foot.  The recovery work, which was expected to take 18 months, was scheduled to be completed this spring, but I was unable to find any reports of a final estimation.

Even during the restoration work, the memorial was not closed to visitors.  Under the management of the National Park Service through its National Mall and Memorial Parks division, the Jefferson Memorial is open 24 hours a day and Park Rangers are on duty to answer questions from 9:30 a.m. to 11:30 p.m. daily and to provide interpretive programs on the hour from 10:00 a.m. until 11:00 p.m.  There’s no admission charge or requirement to make advanced arrangements (except for special events).  The Jefferson Memorial hosts many events and ceremonies each year, including memorial exercises, the Easter Sunrise Service, and the annual National Cherry Blossom Festival.

[“The Jefferson Memorial” is the 400th post on Rick On Theater, which marked its fifth anniversary last March.  Like “Jefferson Memorial,” the majority of posts on the blog have been written by me, either expressly for ROT or for some earlier use and repurposed for the blog, but I’ve also published articles by friends and colleagues whom I’ve invited to contribute and even occasional strangers whose previously-published work I’ve found interesting, amusing, informative, or entertaining and have republished (always fully credited, of course) on my blog.  Whatever the source, however, I’m responsible for the content and have selected the material because I decided it was worth a look by ROT-readers.  I hope that among those varied articles have been some that have provided you all with some enjoyment—or perhaps raised a question or two.  I have no plans to stop posting on ROT anytime in the near future, and I hope from time to time I’ll come up with more pieces of writing that intrigue or edify the blog’s readers.  As always, I welcome comments and I hope you’ll indulge now and then.  ~Rick]