ISSN: 1705-6411
                                   
Volume 7, Number 1 (January, 2010)

Passings: Andrew Wyeth – A Modern Painter Against The Ideology of Modernism

Dr. Gerry Coulter
(Bishop’s University, Sherbrooke, Quebec, Canada)

1. Wyeth. Wind from the sea (1943)

I. Introduction

…on the broadest view, from the standpoint of reason, the world is a great disappointment. In its details, however, and caught by surprise, the world always has a stunning clarity (Baudrillard, 1993:155).

When things happen too fast, nobody can be certain about anything, about anything at all, not even about himself. …the degree of speed is directly proportional to the intensity of forgetting… Our period is obsessed by the desire to forget, and it is to fulfill that desire that it gives over to the demon of speed: it picks up the pace to show us that it no longer wishes to be remembered; that it is tired of itself; sick of itself; that it wants to blow out the tiny trembling flame of memory (Kundera, 1995:135).

People who like modern and contemporary art are not supposed to like the paintings of Andrew Wyeth. Such was the demand of the modernist art police who continued to function well after modernism (not unlike former East European secret police who harassed and harmed long after the fall of the Wall). Not much has changed over the past 130 years except the rules by which the art police function. In the middle and later third of the nineteenth century the then classical art police (of the grand academies), decreed that art was to work toward an ideal vision of the deeds of great men and grand stories (especially those from the bible and history). And so the history of art in this period is largely one of crucifixions, annunciations, landscapes and portraits (especially those of the rich), biblical myths and historical figures such as Alexander the Great. When early modernist art came along and broke all the rules of the classical academics (impressionism, expressionism and so on), the then art police declared “this is not art”. As the twentieth century made the final passages from traditional society to the military-academic-museal-industrial-complex, modernist ideology changed the rules and the new art police came into being. At its most extreme this new monitor declared we were not supposed to like art prior to modernism or art made during the modern period that veered significantly away from cubism, expressionism, and abstraction. Eventually, everything which was not abstract and flat was relegated to the realm of kitsch (Greenburg, 1961).

To his credit Andrew Wyeth was on the wrong side of the modernist art police as he would have been those of the classical academies. He became the kicking boy of modern critics who proved themselves to be as much masters of ideology as art. Mostly they refused to engage with his works (mere “illustrations” as they would have it), because anyone (who shared their ideology), could see what was wrong with them. Similarly, when we think back to the middle of the 19th century we can understand that Wyeth’s preference for “common” scenes and subjects would have been held in contempt by the classical academies as were the early works of Manet.

Today we no longer require an art police and are free to enjoy the art of any time period. Some admirers of modern and contemporary art are even mustering the courage to acknowledge the artistic contributions of Andrew Wyeth – a producer of a very interesting, reflective, and thoughtful body of work. He endured incredible criticism during and for some time after the zenith of modernism. I say farewell to Wyeth the artist by focusing on the artistry of his work within its particular philosophical context. As for the art police they have been recently privatized and play out their role today as investment brokers and speculators in the most unashamed art market in history. This neither surprised nor troubled Wyeth who found it all amusing and quite ironic.

II. Conservative, Pre-Modern, Dead, Morbid…
Among his detractors some cannot get past the fact that Nixon, Reagan, and George W. Bush lauded and praised Wyeth’s work. For some these honors only served to stamp his work with the indelible mark of Republican conservatism. While a strictly conservative reading of Wyeth is possible, it is rather simplistic to dislike anything on the grounds that someone you do not like approves of it. Many today who vehemently dislike Hitler seem to have little difficulty with the recent “progress” of sciences which were extolled and employed by the Nazis (from rocketry to genetics). Mostly though it was the 'realism' and rurality of Wyeth’s painting that so irritated the more fundamentalist modernist critics who stopped only one step short, many times, of finding his work an affront to artistic decency. Yet Wyeth was as immune to criticism as an artist has to be and his mind continued to invent images derived mainly from the rural areas around him (Chadds Ford Pennsylvania and the country near his summer home in Cushing, Maine).

Among Wyeth’s artistic powers was his ability to draw the wrath of modern critics who found the presence of his work so troubling, yet at the same time, could not ignore it. Following decades of vicious criticism by critics, Calvin Tomkins must have thought he had made the final assault on Wyeth when he wrote in the New Yorker that “his art is not just pre-modern, it is stone dead” (Tomkins, 1998:73). As was often the case with Wyeth, Tomkins made no serious effort to penetrate the surface of Wyeth’s work as though the hardened egg tempera was somehow impenetrable to someone who appreciated the easy and eye-pleasing colours of abstract works in acrylic or oil. Eight years after Tomkins’ article over 175,000 people came to see the Wyeth retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum of Art over the course of 14 weeks. None of them, the last surviving modernist art police must have assumed, knew anything about art (see also Classen Knutson, 2005).

2. Wyeth. Christina’s World (1948)

Other critics have found Wyeth’s work to be morbid. While this response may be brought about by the surreal quality of many of his paintings it is important to emphasize that Wyeth was not a painter of sadness. He imparted on the subjects he painted an understanding that to be alone in the world is not sadness – but an art in itself. Alone in time and (usually) open space, each faces up to the indifference of the universe with a quiet resignation. Most of the figures he painted were people he knew but he made no claims in his art to know them at their depths.

3. Wyeth. Henry Teel (1945)

Wyeth’s surfaces are often of individuals inhabiting landscape (or the landscape itself) usually in late autumn or early winter. Wyeth’s palate was very subdued yet he did not attempt to portray a universal order beyond time and space. His works are located firmly in the understanding that the experience of space is inseparable from time experienced as slowness. Living in a quiet rural area and being master of one’s own clock allows this – which has largely been lost in our urban culture where art is also taken to be slaughtered. Wyeth’s are not landscapes of barrenness as some have speculated – rather, they are abundant with time to think in appropriately thoughtful spaces. “Christina” (Olson) was a disabled woman who made her way around her farm by crawling – a pace that suited Wyeth’s art very well.

Wyeth often said of his work that he was more of an abstractionist than a realist. Indeed, if you try to find any of the places he painted, even those in his work of recent years, at most you will find a building or a hill or perhaps a tree. Most of the landscapes he painted were not done by an artist sitting outside with his tools before the ‘actual scene’. Rather, they came to him in his mind, fused fragments of this hill and that furrow which he mentally moved many miles before placing them together with a river which he remembered from some time ago. Wyeth was rarely, if ever, attempting to paint the real – he was no fool.

When we seek to understand the “real” world of surfaces we soon find that it is merely a collection of appearances behind which hides a real we never can know – a real we can only vaguely understand in its enigmatic state. I am sitting at a table as I type this manuscript. From experience I “know” it to be flat, smooth, and solid. From contemporary science I also “know” my table to be (like me), a collection of swirling atoms where the space occupied by the actual atoms is less than the spaces between them. The table on which my keyboard rests is but a collection of waves in different phases than those which constitute me. This rudimentary knowledge of science combined with my own peasant distrust of systems (especially systems of art criticism), the way Baudrillard’s writing has anagrammatized itself onto my thought, and the fact that I grew up in a place not unlike Chadds Ford, allow me to look at Wyeth as something more than an embarrassing stain on the cloth of art history. His most famous work, Christina’s World, is owned by the Museum of Modern Art in New York which paid $1800.00 for it the year after it was painted. It is interesting that MoMA and the other museums which own Wyeth’s work are not lining up to sell such conservative, pre-modern, morbid, and dead work!

III. Wyeth the Modern
Many of Wyeth’s paintings are richly philosophical in their engagement with modernity’s memory loss and the lack of time for reflection in the real time of our advanced systems. He specialized in works which appear very simple on the surface but underneath suggest problems of time and slowness and their first born child, contemplation. Knee jerk responses from modernists often view Wyeth’s work as nostalgic or even melancholy. A more simple view (Reagan or Bush) sees in them a tranquil rural idealism that exists in Republican dreams. Something much more is at work in Wyeth’s contemplative art. Perhaps he touches on a common chord in the human subconscious awareness of time and place which might also account for the popularity of his work.

4. Wyeth. Cranberries (1966) Watercolour

To be fair, when at his worst, Wyeth leaned a little too close to Norman Rockwell for even some of his closest supporters. Works like Cranberries do verge on illustration and what saves them as art in my view is the quality of light – precisely the quality of light which fails to show up in many otherwise very good abstract canvases made by his contemporaries. Even his much maligned series of paintings of his neighbor (and muse) Helga, are masterful studies of light falling on objects in time – the essence of all existence which we never know in any “real” tangible sense, but experience every day with our philosophical sense, if we are allowed the time to do so. Wyeth respected the object and its power over us when natural light bounces off of it just so.

5. Wyeth. Helga (1981)

There is also often a modern photographic quality to Wyeth’s works in their appreciation of fragments of the world and singular objects illuminated by light and time falling slowly like snow. Groundhog Day is one of the few paintings of its time to master the painting of light and shadow which were becoming lost in abstract works. While we may also appreciate the work of Jackson Pollock how 

6. Wyeth. Groundhog Day (1959)
often do we find ourselves wondering where the light in his works comes from (critics do not focus on this). The question as Wyeth makes us aware is where did the light go in modern art?

7. Pollock. Blue Poles (1953)
Wyeth painted against the culture of urgency (as did Pollock in his own way, despite the speed of his dripping brush), the kind of urgency that believed it was leaving places like Chadds Ford behind. This never happened as Wyeth understood it – what took place in the real-time of urban centers was the expulsion of slowness including things like the lived appreciation of the land during the four seasons. The hatred of Andrew Wyeth’s painting of solitude, slowness and light, is a cautionary tale concerning how, in

8. Wyeth. Snow Flurries (1953)
modernity, everything we learn brings with it limitations. To love modernist painting is unavoidable, but to worship at its alter at the expense of appreciating Chardin, or Wyeth, or Wang Long Sheng (see down) is to lose one’s appreciation for thoughtful and contemplative forms of existence and their connection to art. Real-time is about the continuous flow of mediated images – including art criticism – not the thoughtfulness which was built into historical time. Wyeth often ventured from Chadds Ford but he never left behind the appreciation of historical time – it is, an important part of his paintings. In works such as Snow Flurries there is also an abstractness to the scene painted as well as a minimalist quality of the kind which Zen philosophies appreciate and that find their way into the paintings of Mark Rothko.

9. Rothko. Untitled (1969)

As a painter of being-in-time Wyeth painted what we can feel but never really see. As such his paintings are not realist but more about what lies under the surface of appearances, behind which the most real (time and slowness), are to be found for Wyeth. I think Wyeth’s landscapes were so good (among the best of the 20th century), because he had not only a deep appreciation for the land but the contemplative activity of being alone in it under open skies encourages. For those who grew up in places like Chadds Ford, we know what was gained by leaving such places, and we also know what was lost. I live in a nice house on the edge of a relatively small non-industrial city in Canada. There is nowhere here that encourages the kind of contemplation and thoughtful existence that l took for granted in my youth (and yes, one of its names is boredom). Wyeth lived where the dominant voice was the song of the wind which seldom blew hard enough to drown out his thoughts. He traveled, he flew, he owned a car – he understood the pace of the city and disliked the experience of it. There are many who have made this move over the past seventy years and no doubt they are among those who deeply appreciate Wyeth’s memorials to being alone in a rural place. In this, Wyeth’s work has a very modern audience. When it comes to appreciating silence, which there is precious little of anymore, we are all conservatives. If you can look at his Public Sale and not feel its poignancy I may never convince you of the emotions he conjures for many of those who became first-generation city dwellers.

10. Wyeth. Public Sale (1943)

Along with his minimalism and his appreciation for what is lost in the move away from the land, Wyeth was a modern in at least two other ways. He had an appreciation for surrealism than ran to his core. In Christmas Morning he portrays himself in a nightcap from the renaissance lying in his bed which grows out of the land. Similarly, thirty years later in Spring, in a minimalist landscape, the

11. Christmas Morning (1944)
artist portrays himself thawing with the last ice and snow.

12. Wyeth. Spring (1978)

Many of Wyeth’s pictures contain a disquieting surreal quality that exists, in another form, in the works of Edward Hopper. Wyeth’s incessant flirtation with the liminal space between the real and surreal locates him in the zone of appearances more than that of the real. The longer I look at his work the more Wyeth appears to me (as does Hopper), as an agent of the disappearance of reality than as any sort of realist. If however modernism is used as a balm against the embarrassment some people feel from having been born and educated in places like Chadds Ford, then Wyeth will remain outside of art for those people. One of the tasks of modernist ideology after all is to enjoin people to forget what is lost in the passage to real-time existence in the digital city. Modernism as ideology is a powerful palliative when used to cover up both the insecurities of rural origins and the subconscious wounds of loss. Surrealism, we should recall, originates with a foot in two worlds – it is simultaneously modern and anti-modern. Wyeth’s appreciation for the surreal was for its everyday manifestations and he did so with an understanding of both its modernity and anti-modernity. Wyeth serves up a kind of cold modernism – devoid of rich colours, deep in thoughtful contemplation (of subjects like death and mortality). Mark Rothko, who greatly appreciated Wyeth’s work, said it concerned the pursuit of strangeness. Autumn and Winter scenes work very well in this sense and these are also the most contemplative months in rural areas – when time slows to a crawl.

13. Wyeth. Wolf Moon (1975) (dry brush water colour)

Wyeth was also very modern in his more abstract works which he made in both water colour and his preferred medium for most of his major works, egg tempera on board. Indeed, it was his watercolours which captured the attention of other artists

14. Wyeth. Full Moon (1980) (watercolour)
and some of his earliest supporters when Wyeth was quite young.

15. Wyeth. Snowflakes (1966)

In each of the works I have included in this article you may observe that the main subject of Wyeth’s painting was not the object, or even nature, but light itself. For him painting was very much about the recording of light breaking over objects (a very important scientific aspect of modern thought explains that observing light is as close as humans will ever come to the essence of any reality). Image makers who are consumed, as was Wyeth, with light breaking on objects are, in my view, the better recorders of appearances. Those who seek appearances are not interested in attempting to penetrate to some “real”, which we can never know, but in surrendering

16. Wyeth. Long Limb (1998)
to the seduction of appearances. Like Hopper, quite often what Wyeth was painting, in his own manner, was light and feelings certain qualities of light suggest. Wyeth had little use for the real, a deep affection for appearances and emotion, and in this he was a remarkably modern painter.

IV. Conclusion

17. Ma Yuan. Painting on Silk: A Fine Moon (left); and Moments of the Flowering Plum (right) (c1190-1225).

Wyeth’s influence spread far beyond Chadds Ford. In works like Long Limb we detect themes which originated in ancient oriental images (and a more modern version in Full Moon).  Wyeth’s work traveled though China in the 1970s where it coincided with Trauma Painting which emerged following the Cultural Revolution. Wyeth’s work was understood by the Chinese to possess a philosophical concision which had long been appreciated in the East. Some painters there adopted his style and Wang Long Sheng was among those who produced a number of remarkable Wyeth-esque works.

18. Wang Long Sheng. Whispering (1990)

If Andrew Wyeth is a misunderstood artist it may well be because he was a very odd and rich character. He was a unique modernist living in a rural area. His feet were planted in the land but his art was very modern. Most modern critics could only look down on him as from another world.

19. Wyeth. Otherworld (2002)

Wyeth’s work is not morbid or pre-modern and it certainly is not a dead art nor is it ever likely to become one now that we are, once and for all, out from under the enormous yoke of modernist ideology and the surveillance of its art police. What a terrible world it would be to endure had we no paintings by modern painters…  Pollock, Rothko, Motherwell… and Wyeth.

20. Andrew Wyeth. Trodden Weed (1951)

There is a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting. …the degree of slowness is directly proportional to the intensity of memory; the degree of speed is directly proportional to the intensity of forgetting (Kundera, 1995:39).

The game is organizing states of feeling. And states of feeling become questions of light… (Robert Motherwell in Tatge, 1991).

Andrew Wyeth. 12 July 1917 – 16 January, 2009

References

Jean Baudrillard (1993). The Transparency of Evil. New York: Verso.

Clement Greenberg (1961). Art and Culture. Boston: Beacon.

Anne Classen Knutson (2005). Andrew Wyeth: Memory and Magic. Exhibition Catalogue: High Museum of Art, Atlanta (November 12, 2005-February 26, 2006; and the Philadelphia Museum of Art (March 29-July 6, 2006). New York: Rizzoli.

Milan Kundera (1995). Slowness. Harper: New York.

Catherine Tatge (Director, 1991). Robert Motherwell and the New York School.
International Cultural Productions, London.

Calvin Tomkins (1998). “The Art World – Mind Games: Charles Ray and Andrew Wyeth Collide at the Whitney”. The New Yorker (July 20).