Kemper’s Wyeth family reunion spans three melancholy generations
Three paintings, imperfectly understood.
(1) In N.C. Wyeth‘s “Octave Plunged,” a man fights a raging current, viewed from below the falls over which his hewn raft is about to plummet. He’s a lone traveler pitched heroically against the elements. The painting leads the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art’s exhibition Wyeth: Three Generations of Artistry, a retrospective inspired in part by Andrew Wyeth’s death in January. The painting’s exciting subject matter and the visual drama on the canvas reveal the artist himself: an adventurer whose artistic passions drove him into the American West, who rode with cowboys, shared food and warmth in the hogans of American Indians, and lived closely with the natural landscape he loved to paint. N.C. Wyeth is remembered by his children as a strong and monumental man; he sought the thrill of discovery that came with exploring forests and plains, but his inner life resonated in a minor key.
Of his mother, N.C. Wyeth once wrote, “[My grandmother’s] longing soul became my mother’s inheritance. I can read it in her every letter, in her eyes and her voice. It has always impressed me profoundly … I in turn have inherited that strange love for things remote, things delicately perfumed with that sadness that is so exquisitely beautiful.” Step closer to “Octave Plunged,” and that particular cerulean melancholy echoes in the relationships of light and shadow, between the sky and the falls, in the gorgeous thick layers of oil with which he evokes the texture of rock and the rush of rapids. Sunlit, astride his raft, the man teetering over deep blue depths may as well be the artist himself.
(2) In Andrew Wyeth‘s “Pageboy,” his model, Helga Testorf, sits with her usual neutral expression, half in shadow, with a texture like plaster behind her. The wall is rendered with abstract swirls of watery translucence in pleasing contrast with the thick dry-brush egg tempera of her face and hair. The thousands of singular pieces with which Andrew Wyeth documented this particular model shook the art world and popular culture at large.
N.C. passed on to his son a talent for painting, a romantic nature and an introspective streak, but Andrew did not have his vigorous father’s health. Frail, Andrew was home-tutored, his life tightly circumscribed. The Northeastern surroundings of Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, and his prodigious father’s presence were the sum of his world. That world would become, in his paintings, a personal mythological landscape. In his painting “Winter, 1945,” a boy walks down and away from a hill under a cream-colored sky. The hill, an actual place, is also his father, N.C. Wyeth, who died that season in an accident.
Andrew could not paint what was unfamiliar to him, and he imbued the places he knew with a deep personal significance, returning and painting them over and over again, never twice from the same angle or under the same light. So his model Helga Testorf became, in the 15 secret years he studied her, as familiar to him as the Brandywine Valley of Pennsylvania and the coastal farmlands so recognizable in his work.
These portraits in watercolor, pencil and, most spectacularly, dry-brush tempera — Andrew’s medium of choice — were at once recognizably his but startlingly new. As he returned to Testorf, her face and body became yet another landscape with which Andrew impressed his own mythology. After N.C.’s death, Andrew endured a severe lung illness; these two events were pivotal, changing his art forever, introducing themes of perseverance and survival. In the Helga suite, these motifs manifest in his documentation of Testorf’s changing features through time.
(3) The nude woman in James Wyeth‘s “The Island’s Schoolteacher” sits at a table in front of a large picture window. She evokes Edward Hopper’s arrangements of nudes and windows, but the woman has none of the remoteness of Hopper’s figures. James Wyeth’s subjects can be almost desperately alive, like his father’s and his grandfather’s, and this woman is preoccupied with breakfast, a piece of toast dangling from her mouth, her hands engaged with towel and hair, eyes on an open book. This is not a public pose; it is unguarded and intimate, typical of master portraitist James, whose J.F.K. looks out with pensive, unfamiliar eyes and whose Andy Warhol wears an expression likely unknown beyond the pop artist’s close friends.
Unlike Andrew, James never studied with his grandfather, N.C., but he fell in love with oil painting, his grandfather’s medium. His love for oil is tactile — in his thick impastos and fine textures is a deep understanding of his subjects. In many ways, he is his father’s son; James’ early watercolors can be strikingly similar to his father’s. Outside the schoolteacher’s window, the island village, cloaked in darkness to the sea, affirms the persistence of melancholy through generations.
