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EXHIBIT REVIEW
Sleights of Hand
| Andrew Wyeth: Memory and Magic. High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA, November 12, 2005–February 26, 2006, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, March 29–July 16, 2006. Curated by Anne Classen Knutson, Kathleen A. Foster, and Michael Taylor.Andrew Wyeth: Memory and Magic. Edited by Anne Classen Knutson. (New York: High Museum of Art and the Philadelphia Museum of Art in association with Rizzoli, 2005. 224p. Illustrations, index. $49.95.)
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| Almost immediately you can see what makes Andrew Wyeth Andrew Wyeth. |
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On the first wall of Andrew Wyeth: Memory and Magic, as hung in the Philadelphia Museum of Art in the spring and summer of 2006, you are confronted with two images of the sea. The first, The Lobsterman, is a watercolor, painted in 1937, early in Wyeth's career, just a year after he held his first public exhibition at the Art Alliance of Philadelphia. The sea dominates the composition, filling fully 80 percent of the paper. The lobsterman, alone on his boat, works with his back to us, underscoring a sense of lonely hard work and self-sufficient isolation. The second, Adrift (1982), shows us another man on another small boat, except this time the man is lying down—asleep? dead?—and we are nearly in the boat with him. The sea still fills up the composition, but we are so close to the figure that we can't even see the whole boat. |
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The first work owes a great and obvious debt to the watercolors of Winslow Homer, one of those artists Andrew Wyeth has acknowledged as an influence. In the second image, however, the blue of the sea has been replaced by Wyeth's characteristic earth tones; watercolor has been replaced by dry brush tempera, a technique that Wyeth resurrected and made entirely his own; and that Homeresque figure, lonely and set against an impersonal nature, has been replaced with someone far more haunting, spectral, and downright weird. Adrift owes no debt to anyone and is entirely and unmistakably a Wyeth. |
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Memory and Magic is the first large-scale retrospective of Andrew Wyeth's work since 1977 and almost surely the last one to be mounted in the artist's lifetime. Wyeth seems very aware of this, and Memory and Magic has been shaped, in ways subtle and obvious, by the artist's desire to manage our memory of him. Wyeth even speaks to us to an extent unusual for an art show. Quotes from him appear in many of the painting labels and they appear in a few places in large font on the gallery walls themselves. He speaks to us even more in the catalogue essays, which quote him liberally, often from interviews Wyeth has given over the years. |
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Far from being an omnium-gatherum of Wyeth's life's work, many of the curatorial choices made for this exhibit were made to illustrate the issue I alluded to a moment ago: process. They demonstrate how Wyeth paintings wind up the way they do. Sometimes this involves Wyeth or the curators explaining on the label where the subject, composition, or title came from. In other cases, the exhibit lays out studies of works that we can then watch transform into the final product. It does this most dazzlingly with the 1976 composition Sea Boots. On one wall of the show in Philadelphia we see five studies done before we reach the final painting, and it is a remarkable window onto Wyeth's creative process. (Sadly, those five studies are not illustrated in the catalogue, though the final painting is.) |
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