A Wyeth Perspective

Some years back I was fortunate enough to squeeze into an exhibition at Tokyo’s Bunkamura Museum of Art to see a retrospective of American painter Andrew Wyeth. ‘Squeeze in’ is the apt picture because Tokyo art exhibitions by name artists, either Japanese, European or American are always a matter of lining up and then eventually getting a look at the work over the shoulders of the dozens in front of you. Even on an afternoon in mid-week, the lines and crowd are still there, and jostling shoulders is part of the experience. Such was the atmosphere of my visit to see the Wyeth exhibition, though not distraction enough to dull my pleasure in seeing the artist’s work.

Andrew Wyeth was born in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania in 1917. Over the next ninety-one years he became one of the most well-known American artists of the twentieth century. His subjects were the land and the people around him, at both Chadds Ford and in Cushing, Maine where he had a summer home. Wyeth was a realist painter who worked for the most part in what is known as regionalism—a move away from cities with focus on rural life. The young Wyeth learned to draw before he could read and began to study with his father, a painter of considerable reputation, in his teenage years. He held his first one-man exhibition at the age of twenty at the Macbeth Gallery in New York. He sold every painting in the show. For the next fifty years he divided his time between Pennsylvania and Maine, continuing to produce realist paintings in the regionalist style. Wyeth avoided oil paints and worked instead in egg tempura and watercolor.

Christina Olsen (1947) Tempura • Comments by the artist: ‘One day I saw her (Olsen) on the back door step in the late afternoon…she was sitting quietly, with a far-off look to the sea. At the time I thought she looked like a wounded seagull with her bony arms, slightly long hair back over her shoulder and strange shadows of her cast on the side of that weathered door, which had this white porcelain knob on it…’

Maga’s Daughter (1966) Tempura • Comments by Wyeth: ‘I left for Washington one morning and Betsy (wife and subject of this painting) got furious, really flew into a rage. All the way down I kept thinking of that color rising up high into her cheeks. I knew I had captured her. The color of those cheeks under her coal black hair and that hat gives the portrait a real edge…What makes this, is that odd, flat Quaker hat and the wonderful teardrop ribbons and those flushed cheeks. She could be a Quaker girl who’s just come in from riding.’

Distant Thunder (1961) Tempura • Wyeth: ‘I had wanted to paint my wife Betsy picking blueberries. I completed a number of drawings, but nothing worked. I really struggled but got nowhere. Until I decided to hide. I sneaked along the edge of the woods and found her sleeping. I made a quick drawing. As I finished I could here thunder way off…The sky had that yellowish cast before big storms. All of a sudden I realized there was too much face. I painted in the hat…’

Pumpkins (1969) Watercolor on paper • Comments: ‘This was executed at Erickson’s house…He grew a lot of pumpkins. I painted a few pictures of pumpkins. But after I saw all the pumpkins that other people did, I stopped painting them…Imitators quickly take the charisma out of it.’

Thomas Eakins & Winslow Homer

Celebrated painters in the tradition of American realism, Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins are both revered today for their insightful portrayals of Americans at work and play. Eakins filled his canvases with figures that included rowers, wrestlers, baseball players or boxers, while Homer found his subjects in children at play, men hunting, fishing and sailing. The two shared a dedication to realism, but had very different reputations in their own time. Homer was acclaimed as a leading artist in the United States, and enjoyed a good income from his painting alone. Eakins, a Philadelphia painter and art professor, was given only a single one-man show in his whole career and sold less than thirty paintings during his lifetime.

Possibly the most intellectual artist America has produced, Thomas Eakins (1844-1916), was fascinated by the human form and sought to capture it in action and in its purest form. His work was crucial in observing the relationship between painting and photography in the nineteenth century. Controversy shaped much of his career as a teacher and as an artist. He insisted on teaching men and women in the same manner, used nude male models in female classes and vice versa, and was once even accused of abusing female students. The painter’s troubles in this regard may have been caused by a combination of factors. Considering the conventions of the time, there was something clearly bohemian about Eakins and his circle and an inclination toward unorthodox or provocative behavior. The intensity and authority of his teaching style also added fuel to the controversy that haunted Eakins.

The Swimming Hole (1885) is a classic of American painting and shows a scene of healthy, manly, outdoor activity—a group of young fellows stripped down for a swim. It is based on swimming excursions that were enjoyed by the artist and his students—Eakins is the figure in the water at bottom right. According to Eakin’s biographer William McFeely, the image of the artist and five of his male students swimming in the nude embodies a Thoreau-like conviction by Eakins that happiness can be found in freedom from society’s constraints, in living at one with nature. This work hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and has been admired by countless art lovers. Beside all the critical praise the painting has received, there is a problem; the young men do not appear to be doing anything, and are more like figures maintaining positions imposed on them. They look like models in studio poses. Contrary to the artist’s convictions, one could say there is no freedom or sense of being ‘at one with nature’ in this scene.

When Eakins began painting watercolors for exhibition, he took up sporting scenes. The watercolor above is one done in 1873 on off-white wove paper titled, John Biglin in a Scull. As he did in other paintings of athletes, the artist has focused on the male figure in action.

Considered one of the outstanding painters in nineteenth century America and a great figure in American art, Winslow Homer (1836-1910) began his career as a commercial printmaker, first in Boston and then in New York, where he settled in his early twenties. Often a loner, Homer enjoyed isolation and for much of his life was inspired by privacy and silence to do his finest work. Though he had begun working in oil around 1866, he continued to work extensively in watercolor, creating a body of work that primarily chronicled his working vacations. By 1890 Homer began concentrating on the beauty, the force, and drama of the sea. There is movement in his seascapes that captures the feel of the ocean’s mass, the roil and crash of water. These among all his work were the most admired by his contemporaries and remain among his most famous works today.

The Gulf Stream (1889) was based on studies made during Homer’s two trips to the Bahamas. The painting hangs in the Metropolitan Museum, where a curator described it as ‘one of the most typical and central creations of American art.’ In a dynamic composition Homer shows a half-naked black man defiantly spread out on the deck of a small boat, its mast broken, tossed by the sea, threatened by a water spout and surrounded by sharks. The artist had difficulty selling this painting, and speculation suggests it might have been because of what was viewed as its unpleasant or frightening subject matter.

Material collected as an artist-correspondent during the Civil War provided the subjects for Homer’s first oil paintings. This work established his reputation.

The painting above, Prisoners from the Front (1866) represents an actual scene from the war in which a Union officer, Brigadier General Francis Channing Barlow, captured several Confederate soldiers. In the background is the battlefield at Petersburg, Virginia.