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.]
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