Review

The Wyeth mystique, revealed Catherine Fox - Staff Sunday, November 13, 2005 REVIEW

"Andrew Wyeth: Mystery & Magic"

Through Feb. 26. 10 a.m.-8 p.m. today (free). Beginning Tuesday: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesdays-Wednesdays; 10 a.m.-8 p.m. Thursdays-Fridays; 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Saturdays; 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Sundays. $15 adults; $12 seniors and students with ID; $10 ages 6-17; free under 6 and members. Wieland Pavilion, High Museum of Art. 1280 Peachtree St., Atlanta. 404-733-4444, www.high.org.

Verdict: An illuminating look at an artist we thought we knew.

Andrew Wyeth has been revered and reviled with equal intensity for most of his 70-year career.

In one corner are the general public and a few art professionals. They appreciate his craftsmanship, his realism. They respond to his subject matter --- landscape and hardscrabble life in rural New England.

In the other corner are the cognoscenti. The champions of abstraction in the '50s and '60s found Wyeth hopelessly out of it (and his popularity infuriating). Even now that the figure is back in contemporary art, they remain contemptuous. In a recent Art News magazine story previewing the High Museum of Art's "Andrew Wyeth: Mystery & Magic," curators derided his "pinched version" of reality and his "bourgeois melancholy."

Sound familiar? The public and art elite faced off in the same way on the subject of (sunnier) Norman Rockwell. The High's 1999 "Norman Rockwell: Pictures for the American People" was a great success. It prompted a critical about-face, drew huge crowds and got good press. Will lightning strike twice with "Wyeth"?

Guest curator Anne Knutson, who also organized the Rockwell show, contends that Wyeth's detractors haven't really looked at the work. Their view, she believes, has been limited by the typical Wyeth exhibits: greatest hits, group shows of the family (Andrew, his son Jamie and father N.C. ) or the titillating "Helga" series (secretly painted nudes of a neighbor's caretaker).

For the High show, Knutson delved deeper. She subjected the body of his work to a traditional art historical study of form and content. Her conclusion: His oeuvre is more complicated and less realist than he's gotten credit for.

The exhibition focuses on three recurring categories of imagery: vessels, including buckets, baskets and boats; thresholds, both doors and windows; and nature, which encompasses animal and plant life as well as landscape. Knutson decodes them, variously, as portraits, self-portraits and vehicles for expressing emotion. In so doing, she puts the 88-year-old artist on Freud's couch. In her analysis, N.C. Wyeth's untimely death when Andrew was 29 is the source of his preoccupation with death, loss and memory. She also dissects his ambivalence toward his wife, Betsy, who has been stalwart in her support and an active partner in his career but also, it seems, a wet blanket on the freewheeling side of his nature.

The show's thesis is not revolutionary. Using objects as substitutes is a common artistic practice. Vincent van Gogh famously painted chairs as twin portraits of himself and Paul Gauguin. A pair of empty boots as a symbol for the absent owner, most recently used in a touring installation memorializing soldiers who died in Iraq, is by now a cliche. Nor is this show the first reference to the human presence in Wyeth's inanimate objects. Knutson's research, however, is thorough, and the argument she makes in the presentation of 100 paintings and watercolors at the High --- many rarely seen works borrowed directly from the Wyeths --- is persuasive. Surely a viewer looking at the trio of works depicting overcoats hanging on pegs would understand them as stand-ins for figures. The juxtaposition of "The German" (1975), a watercolor portrait of his neighbor Karl Kuerner in his World War I helmet, and "Pine Baron" (1976), a painting of the helmet, now upside down on the ground and filled with pine cones, proves the point in a different way.

Knutson makes a case that Wyeth is more of a magic realist (a term first used to describe surrealists like Rene Magritte who painted precisely rendered fictions) than a realist. "Christmas Morning" (1944), in which a ghostly cipher of a human being is embedded in a winter landscape, is obviously a fantasy, but "Far From Needham" (1966), an image of a large granite outcropping, is just as eerie. Learning that Needham was Wyeth's father's hometown only confirms the sense that the rock is a headstone.

So there's more to Wyeth than we usually see, and more than we thought we knew. The larger question is, how does this knowledge affect our response?

Mine is still mixed. The show adds dimension to his oeuvre, but it also reveals a maudlin, melodramatic streak. Wyeth's work is strong when he keeps his emotions muffled and symbolism subtle.

"Winter, 1946," his first painting after the death of his father, is one of his best. An image of a lone figure running down a grassy hill, it subtly conveys the feeling of being unmoored and out of control through its odd perspective and the figure's awkward posture. In contrast, the surreal "Spring" (1978), which was inspired by the impending death of Karl Kuerner, his friend and a father figure, is a cringe-worthy tableau of a corpse partially covered with the last bit of snow on a grass-covered hill. (That it is the same hill depicted in "Winter," a place Knutson believes represents Wyeth's father, is interesting, but it doesn't improve my opinion of the painting.)

It's hard to believe that the artist who paints the serene interior "Ground Hog Day" (1959) or turns "Cooling Shed" (1953) into an almost abstract play of planes and shapes would sign his name to "Break Up" (1994), a painting of a pair of hands rising out of an ice floe like a B-grade horror film. Or that someone capable of the psychological intensity that simmers in his portraits would stoop to "Dr. Syn" (1981), a skeleton in an admiral's uniform that looks like something out of "Pirates of the Caribbean."

But only the most pigheaded critic would not give the artist his due in matters of skill. Wyeth is a fluid watercolorist and a master of tempera (pigment in egg yolk).

His sober sand and taupe palette, which he adopted at his wife's suggestion early in his career, reflects his mournful psyche. (If he were a season, he would be late fall.) The tempera medium, which is a good vehicle for rendering details, serves his almost scientific interest in nature and his pleasure in re-creating it with precision. This is evident in the sunlight glinting on the split ends of Helga's braids, the texture of crushed shells and sand and the way he renders every spine of every feather on a pair of crows even though it is only a study.

As one might expect, Wyeth likes the flinty poetry of Robert Frost. Coincidentally, Frost's "The Road Not Taken" might be a metaphor for the artist's career. In the late '40s, he and Jackson Pollock were neck and neck in terms of critical respect. But then the forces of art history diverged from the path Wyeth was taking --- in the footsteps of Thomas Eakins, Winslow Homer and the American Scene painters --- and went in the direction of abstraction, pop and so on.

We are all, it is said, prisoners of the visual culture we grew up in. The other fork in the road is of more interest to me, but when Wyeth is considered on his own terms on the basis of his best work, he's earned a place of honor in American art.

HIGH MUSEUM > Online: You can find "Remaking the High Museum" articles, which chronicle the lead-up to the Nov. 12 opening of the expanded campus --- as well as Catherine Fox's architecture review of the newly expanded museum --- online at www.accessatlanta.com/highmuseum.

WYETH BOOK "Andrew Wyeth: Memory & Magic" (Rizzoli, $30), a handsome and scholarly but highly readable hardback catalogue, accompanies the exhibition. Four essays flesh out the major themes. Curator Anne Knutson digs into the symbolism of vessels, thresholds and nature. Michael Taylor explores Wyeth's artistic roots and influences, which range from Renaissance art and Edward Hopper to surrealism. Kathleen Foster addresses his process by deconstructing a single painting, "Groundhog Day." Christopher Crosman writes about the major role Wyeth's wife, Betsy, has played in his career. The catalog includes 90 full-page plates of works in the exhibition. Images of works by other artists and Wyeth pieces not in the show generously sprinkled throughout the text augment one's understanding of this famously private artist. --- Catherine Fox