Gallery Chronicle (January 2018)

THE NEW CRITERION, January 2018

Gallery Chronicle

On “The Sculpture of Gonzalo Fonseca” at The Noguchi Museum, “Lois Dodd: Selected Paintings” at Alexandre Gallery, “Kenneth Noland: Circles, Early + Late, 1959–1962, 1999–2002” at Yares Art & “Elizabeth Murray: Painting in the ’80s” at Pace.

The Noguchi Museum must be close to the ideal conception of a place for art. In 1985, near the end of his remarkable life, the artist Isamu Noguchi established this museum in a converted factory building in Long Island City, Queens, as a home for his art and a reflection of his practice. A dual artistic citizen, Noguchi maintained passports to both the avant-gardes of the West and the cultural traditions of the East. Most renowned for his sculpture, but equally influential for his dance sets and playground designs, not to mention his Akari lamps and modernist furniture, Noguchi understood that works of art do not exist in isolation. Instead, they interact with what is around them. “If sculpture is the rock,” Noguchi once wrote, “it is also the space between rocks and between the rock and a man, and the communication and contemplation between.”

Gonzalo Fonseca in his quarry studio in Saravezza, Italy, 1979. Photo: Estate of Gonzalo Fonseca

Noguchi created his museum as a garden for his art. Its indoors, its outdoors, and its in-between areas guide and cultivate our engagement with his work while nurturing his sculptures in deferential space. By design, there are no wall labels, no didactic texts, not even numbered works, just a checklist by the door in each room. While many art museums have looked to become all things to all people, often, in the process, devolving into a form of hectoring entertainment, the Noguchi Museum still operates closer to a gallery. Here art is allowed to speak for itself—and to talk to us.

Over the last decade, this museum has looked to expand, through exhibitions and programs, in ways that broaden its scope beyond its collection while remaining faithful to the vision of its founder. Such initiatives often fail, but the museum’s Senior Curator, Dakin Hart, has done it in a way that has been sensitive and wise. I thought his placement of Noguchi sculptures in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden a few years ago—some of them practically hidden, as though released into the wild and now roaming free—reflected a perfect understanding of art with a life of its own.

The latest project at the museum is “The Sculpture of Gonzalo Fonseca.”1 A better title for this exhibition, curated by Hart and organized in partnership with the artist’s estate, might be “Fonseca and Noguchi,” or perhaps “Noguchi and Fonseca.” Stirred into the mix of the collection, especially as the show opens on the museum’s ground floor, the sculptures of Fonseca (1922–97) are almost certain to be confused by many museum-goers with Noguchi’s own.

Installation view, “The Sculpture of Gonzalo Fonseca.” Photo: Nicholas Knight / The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum.

Fonseca deserves a full retrospective. This exhibition is not that. But short of such an expectation, the museum’s intimate if quirky treatment of the Uruguayan artist reveals much, in particular through his affinities with the American sculptor. Just as Noguchi emerged from the studio of Constantin Brancusi to become a border-crossing artist, Fonseca looked beyond his training with Joaquín Torres-García to an expansive cultural application of modernist form. As Noguchi turned to Japan for influence, Fonseca saw Italy as a primary source for his creative archeology. Equally accomplished as an architect and draftsman as a sculptor, Fonseca recombined fragmentary forms, seemingly unearthed from the classical past, in imaginary, Swiftian worlds.

The exploration of scale, in addition to time and place, was Fonseca’s remarkable accomplishment. One of this exhibition’s two small, wordless chapbooks, published in lieu of an exhibition catalogue, examines the theme. Fonseca’s worlds of doors, windows, and ladders, often carved into single slabs, could be Lilliputian in size, or they could be the representation of something much larger. The outsize scale of the Tuscan stone quarry in which he worked helped Fonseca take these questions to extremes. What resulted were microcosms of culture in wood and stone, often delightful cultural excavations, with tiny forms embedded into a sculptural architecture. Considered in another scale, Fonseca’s sculptures became his personal museum, not unlike Noguchi’s own.

Lois Dodd, View Through Elliot’s Shack, Looking South, 1971, Oil on linen, Alexandre Gallery.

Born in 1927, Lois Dodd studied at New York’s Cooper Union in the 1940s. She was one of the founders of New York’s pioneering Tanager Gallery in the 1950s. Yet unlike much of the rest of the New York School, who were painting windows to their souls, Dodd has spent a lifetime painting windows to windows. Her body of work, now continuing into her tenth decade, has always been a window to an independent artistic spirit. Whether looking out the window from her East Village tenement, or from her childhood home in Montclair, New Jersey, or from her cottage in Cushing, Maine, Dodd has revealed the mood of nature, shelter, and viewpoint through an economy of form and brushstroke.

Noting her “complex, highly poetic pictorial compositions based on the structures and settings and shifting light” around “windows and doorways,” our late colleague Hilton Kramer rightly championed Dodd as among the “class of highly accomplished American painters whose work has been consistently rejected by the New York museum establishment.” Hilton lamented that the establishment would fail to catch up with Dodd in his lifetime. In her own, at least, Dodd is now the subject of a new monograph, her first, written by the curator and critic Faye Hirsch and published by Lund Humphries as part of its series on contemporary painters.

Now through January 27, Alexandre Gallery, Dodd’s steadfast representation, has mounted a must-see survey show occasioned by the publication.2

“Of the many recurrent observational subjects that Dodd has treated throughout her career,” Hirsch writes of Dodd in the monograph, “none has been more conspicuously ongoing than that of her windows.” Even when painting en plein air, as depicted in the diminutive Shadow Painter of 2008, Dodd’s most successful compositions are fenestral visions. Cropped by the frames, reordered by the sashes, the images in her paintings form a Mondrian-like grid that may reflect, or look out upon, additional windows in view.

Lois Dodd, Moonlit Road, NJ, 1976, Oil on masonite, Alexandre Gallery.

At the right moments, light, color, and form punctuate—see, for example, the window behind the window, framed in the lower left sash, in View Through Elliot’s Shack, Looking South (1971); the boogie-woogie rhythm of Men’s Hotel with 11 Windows Lit (2016); and the fields of fog filling up the panes, just slightly askew, of Steamed Window (1980).

Moonlit Road, NJ (1976) is a tour de force of Symbolist mood and structure. Where the compositions become too orderly and large, such as in some recent still lifes of wildflowers, I miss the spontaneity of the quick glances and the sideways views. Dodd is a painter whose spare compositions and thin brushstrokes recall the Yankee thrift of Milton Avery, who was said to make his paint last longer than anyone. At Alexandre, in a small side gallery, we find Dodd at her best. Here, in tiny images painted right on metal flashing, we see fleeting glimpses captured in timeless poetry.

Installation view, “Circles: Early + Late” at Yares Art. Photo: Yares Art

In the late 1950s, Kenneth Noland (1924–2010) ran circles around American abstraction. Color-rich and cool, his “Circle” paintings were radically reticent departures from the expressionism of the New York School. Then, four decades on, Noland circled back on the motif. Last month,“Circles: Early + Late” at Yares Art joined the two “Circle” periods together in an exhibition that told us “everything he discovered over a half century of painting,” as Karen Wilkin writes in her catalogue essay.3

A famous studio visit organized by the critic Clement Greenberg in 1953, which also included Morris Louis, introduced Noland to Helen Frankenthaler and her technique of staining unprimed canvas. Noland soon went on to soak his own paintings in circular bands of inky acrylic. The thinning of the picture plane produced abstractions that appear to thicken as they pour, spin, and explode into view.

The “Circles” of the 1950s and ’60s were like silent detonations in the history of modern art. As familiar as they have become, in person they remain powerful and original. Elusive in meaning, yet emerging at the height of the Cold War, the compositions may recall fallout maps with bands of visual radiation. The red-hot Spring Call of 1961 can even seem to contain a thermonuclear core at its moment of detonation.

Or maybe they are something else altogether. Like the mandalas of Tantric Eastern art, which helped teach Noland “what a circle could do,” these concentric abstractions came to represent both ends and beginnings— especially for Noland himself.

In the 1990s, Noland employed new paints, rich in chroma and embedded with microscopic metals, to return to the circle. The two series of “Circles” “bracket Noland’s long and distinguished working life,” Wilkin writes. In their reconsideration, the artist found ways to flip his late circles inside out. Rather than leaving areas unprimed, Noland covered every square inch of his late canvases in sparkling, nebular color. At the far end of his long career, the centrifugal spinning of Noland’s paintings from the 1950s and ’60s became, in the 1990s and 2000s, an increasingly inward, centripetal, absorbing, and mesmerizing pull.

Kenneth Noland, Magic Theatre, 2000, Acrylic on canvas, Yares Art

In the 1980s, Elizabeth Murray (1940–2007) exploited the cracks of modernism with paintings that could not help but crack up. Through fun shapes and funkier colors, she cracked open her canvases in cartoonish bursts and zig-zag patterns. Now at Pace through January 13, “Elizabeth Murray: Painting in the ’80s” takes the picture plane on a barnstorming joyride, beginning with the sloshing, shattered coffee of Wake Up (1981) on up through increasingly wild, expanding forms of oil on canvas that seemingly bend, crunch, and splat.4

Elizabeth Murray, Wake Up, 1981, Oil on canvas, Pace Gallery. Photo: Ellen Labenski.

For all of its amusements, “Painting in the ’80s” makes a serious, and often overlooked, case for Murray as a leading light of the neo-Expressionists, one who found innovative ways to reinvigorate oil on canvas from the minimalist doldrums of the 1970s. It was an early engagement with Cézanne that convinced Murray to refocus her talents on painting rather than commercial art as a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The structures of Post-Impressionism and Cubism continued to undergird her colors and forms, even, or especially, as her palette grew more outlandish and her canvases more distended.

With cracked compositions, the walls and rooms of the gallery space become part of the structural matrix. Ultimately, in both her departure from and her embrace of modernist painting, Murray’s disintegration of substances and surfaces was informed by a history of vanguard art. Her accomplishments, one-on-one, may seem cartoonish and slight, an impish raspberry in the face of modernism. But through this amusing and illuminating show, especially in her larger, vertiginous work, Murray has the last laugh.

1 “The Sculpture of Gonzalo Fonseca” opened at The Noguchi Museum, Queens, on October 25, 2017 and remains on view through March 11, 2018.

2 “Lois Dodd: Selected Paintings” opened at Alexandre Gallery, New York, on December 2, 2017 and remains on view through January 27, 2018.

3 “Kenneth Noland: Circles, Early + Late, 1959–1962, 1999–2002” was on view at Yares Art, New York, from November 11 through December 30, 2017.

4 “Elizabeth Murray: Painting in the ’80s” opened at Pace, New York, on November 2, 2017 and remains on view through January 13, 2018.

A Taste for "Hansel and Gretel"

When it comes to Christmas-time family fare, there may be no equivalent to The Nutcracker, Tchaikovsky’s ballet warhorse. In the world of opera, Engelbert Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel comes the closest. This fairytale opera of the story by the Brothers Grimm was first performed on December 23, 1893, with Richard Strauss conducting in Weimar. The opera has been associated with the Christmas season ever since, including at New York’s Metropolitan Opera House, which broadcast its first complete radio performance of the opera on Christmas Day, 1931.

Yet this tale of witches, cannibalism, and abandoned children is hardly a sojourn in the Land of Sweets. Starting this week through January 6, the Met presents seven family performances in English of Richard Jones’s 2007 production that enlarges the story’s unsavory bits into an absurd, surrealist staging of giant fish-heads, baked witches, and triumphant children, with Donald Runnicles in the pit.

When considering the stories we tell children, I am generally in favor of more Brothers Grimm, not less. The nineteenth-century folktales can horrify parents as much as they delight children, who still retain an innocence around play and metaphor—realism being an invention, of course, of modern adulthood. The same goes for the elements of the Met’s Hansel and Gretel. An opera that begins in harsh reality ends in sweet fantasy—in this case, with a child-eating witch baked into a loaf of gingerbread.

Lisette Oropesa and Tara Erraught in Hansel and Gretel. Photo: Marty Sohl / Metropolitan Opera

The first act, set in a dingy cottage, is straight out of Tobacco Road. Mother Gertrude (Dolora Zajick) returns from work to find her hungry children, Hansel (Tara Erraught) and Gretel (Lisette Oropesa), eating a jar of cream. She punishes them by sending the siblings to the forest, as her husband, Peter (Quinn Kelsey), arrives home drunk. The staging is bleak, and the social commentary is heavy-handed, as Gertrude is turned from a wicked step-mother (who actually dies at the end of the original Grimm story) into an aggrieved spouse.

The facts of this first act are then put in contrast with the fantasy of the second and third—but, for mixed-aged audiences, a little more surrealism up front might have tempered the heavy realism of the social pageant.

Ask any child about “Hansel and Gretel” and the first thing they mention is the trail of breadcrumbs. But you won’t find a single crumb here, at least in Jones’s production. Rather than a forest, the children wander through a Magritte-like hall, with leafy wallpaper, an antler chandelier, and trees dressed in suits. After a sprinkling for the sandman (Rihab Chaieb, needlessly creepy), the children enter their Traumpantomime. Then the fun begins.

“I love this part,” my seven-year old whispered to me, as the hall door opened in a beam of light. Fourteen angels make their entrance—here as giant-headed chefs, resembling those you might find in Maurice Sendak’s “Mickey in the Night Kitchen.” The chefs lay out a feast for the hungry children as the fish-headed major duomo, in tailcoat and fins, emerges from a trap door to light the candelabras. There is much to love at this moment, as Humperdinck’s music swirls and swells under Runnicles’s baton. In person, the absurdity of the staging makes perfect sense.

Lisette Oropesa, Tara Erraught, and Gerhard Siegel in Hansel and Gretel. Photo: Marty Sohl / Metropolitan Opera

The third act is a return to reality, of sorts, this time not as tragedy but farce. After long preludes defined by increasingly frightening screens—a plate becomes a mouth becomes an opera dentata—the siblings awake in The Witch’s kitchen. This time the setting is a dingy industrial floor, complete with roll-down shutters and stained metal appliances. Propped up against the walls of this Bowery torture chamber are mummified children—The Witch’s previous victims, all baked into loaves of gingerbread.

Gerhard Siegel as The Witch in drag plays up the camp, and a food fight with funneled sweets cuts the Paul-McCarthy-like mawkishness of what would otherwise be a truly horrific scene. Finally tricked into her own oven, The Witch re-emerges as a steaming breadloaf. The gingerbread children are freed from their spell, and a youth chorus signals the end of this childhood redemption story of yearning hunger ultimately satisfied in a spine-tingling finale. 

So, is this “family” performance appropriate for children? Of course it is. The kids get it; my seven-year-old loved it. The real question should be, Do today’s helicopter parents still have a taste for “Hansel and Gretel”?

Andrew Wyeth Forever

THE NEW CRITERION, December 2017

Andrew Wyeth Forever

On the career of Andrew Wyeth and the traveling exhibition, “Andrew Wyeth: In Retrospect.”

Andrew Wyeth was born a century ago this year. To mark the centennial, the United States Postal Service issued a series of stamps and keepsakes, with a launch ceremony last July in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, the place of Wyeth’s birth and, along with Cushing, Maine, a lifelong focus of his art. With a selvage that includes a photograph of the young artist in his Chadds Ford studio from the 1930s, the $5.88 sheet features a pane of “twelve Andrew Wyeth Forever® stamps” that reproduce Wyeth’s paintings of rural and coastal life in a five-inch adhesive grid. Here in miniature are the billowing curtains of Wind from the Sea (1947), the milk-cooling bath of Spring Fed (1967), the old schoolhouse that became My Studio (1974), the North Light (1984) of the next-door studio of his famous father, the illustrator Newell Convers (N. C.) Wyeth, and various interiors and exteriors of hardscrabble rusticity—Big Room (1988), Alvaro and Christina (1968), Frostbitten (1962), Soaring (1942–1950), and Young Bull (1960). Also included is a stamp of Wyeth’s most well-known painting, Christina’s World (1948)—acquired by Alfred H. Barr, Jr. fresh from a gallery wall in 1949, it became Wyeth’s only work to enter the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, where it remains today on extended if unceremonious view.

Andrew Wyeth in 1983. Photo: Bruce Weber / Agence France-Presse—Getty Images

The issuing of commemorative stamps is an honor that has been bestowed on other twentieth-century painters, of course, but the occasion might seem all too fitting for Andrew Wyeth, an artist who posted a popular alternative to the onrush of modernity with what many considered to be the timeless correspondence of rural American life. Widely reproduced thanks to the commercial savvy of his wife, Betsy, Wyeth’s paintings have endlessly circulated in a way that has long enthralled the public—who have flocked to his exhibitions and collected his posters—and infuriated his critics—who have regarded his philatelic reputation as a postage-sized legacy.

“An image of American life—pastoral, innocent, and homespun—which bears about as much relation to reality as a Neiman Marcus boutique bears to the life of the old frontier,” is how my late colleague Hilton Kramer saw Wyeth in 1970, at the time of a retrospective at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, that broke records for attendance. Six years later came the Metropolitan’s own blockbuster “Two Worlds of Andrew Wyeth: Kuerners and Olsons,” organized by Thomas Hoving, the museum’s director, after his curators passed on the exhibition. Remarking on Wyeth’s “monochrome vision of the world,” here Hilton wondered “if there is not in this art a hidden scatological obsession. How else can one account for the excremental quality of this palette, which censors out anything that might complicate its ‘earthy’ view of nature and human experience?”

Beyond false realism, a near unanimity of critics has accused Wyeth of trafficking, it might be said, in a false consciousness of American life. Wyeth’s images of “frugal, bare-bones rectitude” may be “incarnated in real objects” wrote Robert Hughes in the New York Review of Books, but they have been “glazed by nostalgia . . . which millions of people look back upon as the lost marrow of American history.” A “kitsch-meister” of “dreary vignettes” that “celebrate . . . cultural and social immobility” (Robert Storr), Wyeth painted “formulaic stuff not very effective even as illustrational ‘realism’ ” (Peter Schjeldahl) in a palette of “mud and baby poop” (Dave Hickey). “Not a great artist.” “The press noted when he voted for Nixon and Reagan” (Michael Kimmelman).

Indeed, it does not take long to sense something false, even sinister, in Wyeth’s most famous painting, Christina’s World—so long as you can find the work hanging in the Museum of Modern Art. Following its acquisition, the anti-modernity of this vastly popular image, a standard dorm-room appurtenance for a generation of liberal-arts majors, has long been a bugaboo for the museum’s curatorial staff, who excommunicated the painting from the collection halls to the museum’s utility spaces.

Andrew Wyeth, Christina’s World, 1948, Tempera on panel, The Museum of Modern Art.

Wyeth’s painting of a woman crawling up a weedy hill towards a forlorn house has itself moved up, from hanging outside one moma restroom to another. Christina’s World is these days found surrounded by a constellation of information desks, elevator banks, escalators, and baby-changing areas. Yet the public still seeks it out, for its celebrity as well as its strangeness—lingering, as I observed, over the painting’s details long after taking the requisite photograph.

Christina’s World presents several mysteries. The first is any sense of how it could have been created with such exacting detail. Tempera, Wyeth’s medium of choice, is an ancient and challenging concoction of egg yolk and mineral pigment. From Roman times until the sixteenth century, egg tempera was the primary medium of painting. The advent of oil then brought about a more flexible and forgiving medium that allowed for the use of lightweight canvas instead of heavy and stiff wooden panels. N. C. Wyeth, Andrew’s father and teacher, was an oil painter. Peter Hurd, an apprentice to N. C. who became Andrew’s brother-in-law, introduced tempera to Andrew as an antiquarian curiosity in the 1930s. In 1938, the two attended a demonstration of tempera painting in the Early Renaissance manner given by Daniel V. Thompson at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Wyeth went on to study Old Master paintings in the museum collection, especially information-packed compositions in the style of Pieter Bruegel I, the Flemish artist who painted in both tempera and oil.

Fast drying, tempera also allows for far greater detail than oil. Much like drawing in paint, one thin line at a time, tempera permitted Wyeth to deploy his full talents for draftsmanship—inherited from his father—to his final compositions. Tempera also distinguished Andrew’s body of work from the more expected look and faster pace of the paintings of N. C., who created illustrations on commission for such books as Treasure Island. Whereas N. C. once dismissed his apprentice son’s experiments in the medium, it was the alchemic deployment of tempera that came to define the unreality of Andrew’s slowly produced final compositions, such as Christina’s World. He even found a favorite egg, the Extra Large from the local Wawa convenience store, which he used for its yolks while feeding the whites to his dogs.

Christina’s World purports to display a far greater degree of information than a painting should possibly contain. Every dried blade of grass, on up to the ridgeline, seems to be present and accounted for. The same goes for the warped clapboard siding and stained roof shingles of the minutely detailed buildings, cutting into the horizon line with uninterrupted drama, far up along the crest of the hill.

Yet, for all of its detail, the painting communicates only the most elusive of narratives. Who is Christina? What is “her world”? What accounts for her oversized, talon-like hands tearing at the dirt, or her thin, chicken-like arms holding her up? With her face turned away, what does she even look like? Why is she on the ground at all, tense and twisted against our view? What of the house’s treeless desolation, the sorry ladder leading up to its roof, the tattered clothing on the line, the murder of crows flying out of the hayloft, the tire tracks unaccountably cutting through the field, or just the general, sepia-toned sense of disrepair? And what are we, as viewers, meant to make of our own role in surveying this captivatingly maudlin scene?

The view today of Kuerner’s Hill from Kuerner Farm. Photo: James Panero

Hilton was right to conclude that Wyeth “offers the world a dream that it cherishes—a pastoral alternative to what both art and life normally afford—and the world will beat a path to the door of whatever institution makes it available.” A recent blockbuster exhibition in Chadds Ford at the Brandywine River Museum of Art, “Andrew Wyeth: In Retrospect,” for the first time allowed the close comparison of a large selection of Wyeth’s body of work with the very places that informed his working—his own studio and the studio of his father, along with “Little Africa” and Kuerner Farm, the home of his portrait subjects Karl and Anna Kuerner and the workplace of Helga Testorf.1 Only recently entering the public trust, and now administered by the Brandywine Conservancy, these sites and the history that surrounds them illuminate the dreamy brand of realism that Wyeth so expertly, if excruciatingly, captured.

As this exhibition now travels on to the Seattle Art Museum, the Brandywine’s partner institution, such comparisons must be made over longer distances, but they remain equally compelling. For what becomes apparent, walking the same back roads that Wyeth walked for some nine decades (he died in 2009 at the age of ninety-one), is how vastly circumscribed his version of “realism” truly must have been, especially in his seemingly hyper-realistic tempera on panel. Despite all of the details they include, compared to on-the-ground reality, Wyeth’s compositions are most significant for what they leave out, with restrictive editing that imbued his minimal and even abstract paintings with a desolate aura.

This is certainly true for Christina’s World (which did not travel for the show and remains at moma). The coastal Maine property indeed exists, and an infirm Anna Christina Olson did live there. In 1989 the fourteen-room colonial was put up for sale by then–Apple ceo John Sculley for $1.25 million. It was eventually donated to the Farnsworth Art Museum. But the reality of Wyeth’s scene ends there. The model for the painting was in fact Wyeth’s able-bodied wife, Betsy. Her shoes were costume props. The trees obscuring the ridgeline were stripped away, while the depth of field of the hillside was greatly extended. And the painting’s palette was thoroughly scrubbed of its blues, as in a photographic process.

Take another famous Wyeth hill, Winter 1946 (1946), this one in the current exhibition: Same tawny colors. Same sharp ridgeline and depth of field. Same mysterious figure in the foreground—this time, a boy twirling down. Even the same tire tracks cutting through the grass. The actual location Wyeth depicted here is Kuerner’s Hill, across from Kuerner Farm. But the reality of its shapes and colors is unrecognizable when compared to the painting—despite, again, Wyeth’s persistence of supposed detail.

Still from King Vidor’s The Big Parade. Photo: Jeff Rapsis

The most compelling aspect of “Andrew Wyeth: In Retrospect,” as explored in a catalogue essay by the art historian Henry Adams, is the artist’s fascination with American movie-making. In particular, this meant silent movies, and, specifically, the 1925 blockbuster The Big Parade, about three American GIs of differing backgrounds sent to the Western Front in World War I. Later in life, Wyeth reached out to King Vidor, the film’s forgotten creator, with a mash note and invitation to visit:

I consider your war film The Big Parade the only truly great film ever produced. Over the years I have viewed the film many, many times and with each showing the certainty of its greatness deepens. I have always viewed it with awe and I must tell you that in many abstract ways it has influenced my paintings.

Wyeth wasn’t kidding about his interest in this movie. At the time of Vidor’s visit in 1975, Wyeth had watched The Big Parade some 180 times. By his death some thirty years later, the number of showings, according to Adams, had reached 500. Adventure films in general were of interest to Wyeth. When I recently toured his preserved studio, the canistered reels for Captain Blood were still on the bookshelf. But Vidor’s cinematic innovations were Wyeth’s great artistic inheritance: the perspective lines reaching to an unobstructed horizon, the feeling for scarred battlefield landscapes, and the use of visual symbols such as shoes to signify meaning. Much like Wyeth’s own foreshortening of narrative, Vidor himself imagined a cinema of the future “without a story. By that I mean a production in which the main interest will center about the atmosphere and background rather than in the acting or the plot.”

Wyeth manipulated his compositions much like a silent film director. His captions were his allusive titles. He used real people and real places but cast them in his own scouted locations, working extensively through preparatory drawings and watercolors to distill the vision in tempera. In his lack of authenticity and his chilly sentiment, Wyeth was decidedly unmodern. His artifice might be considered postmodern, even contemporary, as he processed the idioms of one medium through the materials of another, pressing it all together in the dying light of illustration and the lingering moods of Symbolism and the American Gothic.

At the same time, the approach was far from superficial for Wyeth. His compositions largely emerged from personal, psycho-cinematic places. His figures and locations all conveyed a personal if sublimated feeling. For example, Wyeth first met the Olsons later on the same day he had met his wife—a psychological metonymy that helps explain why Betsy could serve as the model for Christina’s World. That same Cushing hill meant so much to Wyeth that he was buried in the Olson family plot at the location of the painting’s point of view (Wyeth had once observed Christina Olson delivering flowers to the same cemetery, a scene that inspired the painting and the figure’s dusty hands).

An even deeper sense of connection runs through Chadds Ford, and in particular the Kuerner Farm. In 1945, N. C. Wyeth and his three-year-old grandson and namesake— Andrew’s nephew—were struck and killed at a railroad crossing by an unscheduled mail train that ran on a track along the edge of the Kuerner property. The farm overlooks the site of the crash, while the hill obscures it. The impact was so catastrophic that N. C. was compacted in his vehicle, while the toddler was thrown from the car, dying when his neck snapped against an embankment. Allan Lynch, the boy Wyeth went on to depict in Winter 1946, is the one who first came upon the wreckage and kept the wild dogs from lapping up the blood.

The gruesome battle scenes of The Big Parade, which Wyeth first saw with his father in a Wilmington theater when he was eight, became the filter for this family tragedy. Wyeth depicted Karl Kuerner, who was a German machine gunner in the war, as his paintings’ menacing antagonist, often in full trench uniform. Meanwhile Wyeth himself might be seen as the movie’s upper-crust hero, Jim Apperson, a dandy figure despised by his father, but one who finds a cause fighting alongside his central-casting working-class friends: Slim, a construction worker; and Bull, a bartender.

Much like Jim Apperson in his war, Andrew Wyeth in his art was a coastal elite who romanticized but also valorized the struggles of the overlooked and the flown-over. His circle of collectors and friends included the Du Ponts, whose Gilded Age estates, including Winterthur and Longwood Gardens, surround Chadds Ford. Driven by personal struggle and a captivating fetish for the downtrodden, Wyeth painted out his own Hollywood redemption plot. His art was his artifice. Much like his extensive collection of toy soldiers, which still populate his studio shelves, his subjects were stand-ins. His sense for the magic of the movies may not have derived from a high-modernist manifesto. Nevertheless through his astonishing technique he managed to illustrate a personal story that has resonated with generations. If not empathetic, his compelling images still offer up a voyeuristic escape, all with the timeless stamp of inauthenticity.

1 “Andrew Wyeth: In Retrospect” opened at the Seattle Art Museum on October 19, 2017 and remains on view through January 15, 2018. The exhibition was previously on view at the Brandywine River Museum of Art, Chadds Ford (June 24–September 17, 2017).