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You, Andrew Wyeth
May. 14th, 2006 11:49 pmAnd here face down beneath the sun
Here upon Earth's noonward height
To feel the always coming on
The always rising of the night:
To feel creep up the curving East
The earthy chill of dusk and slow
upon those underlands the vast
And ever climbing shadow grow
MacLeish wasn't addressing Andrew Wyeth, of course, but he may as well have been. I went to the Wyeth exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art yesterday, and I'm left with a lingering impression of room after room full of Wyeth's endless, dream-like landscape, those grey-green Pennsylvania hillsides stretching on from one painting to the next. His paintings are all unmistakably set in the same world: a world where it is always winter, where the light is always thin and pale, and where the earthy chill of dusk is ever-present and night is always just a moment away. It got a bit wearying by the end -- all the emotional intensity, the feeling of suspended animation, of waiting for something that is just about to happen, every painting like a held breath -- but I was impressed by Wyeth's ability to imbue every object with a significance greater than itself, so that a still-life that, in the hands of another artist, might have been merely a shell on a table was somehow indefinably more meaningful than that. How does one do that in a visual medium?
I was also amazed by Wyeth's ability to make paintings built around a sense of absence, where what is not in the frame is more important than anything that is. The best example of this was also my favorite piece in the show: Love in the Afternoon.
There was one room in the exhibition that was devoted to tracking Wyeth's creative process as he worked on a single painting. The room featured a series of sketches and studies for Groundhog Day, hung in chronological order along with Wyeth's own explanations of the development of the painting throughout its various stages. I was surprised to see how much his conception of the painting changed as he worked. He began with sketches of a woman sitting by a window with a dog sleeping nearby; the dog disappeared; first the table became the focus, then the view outside the window; the woman vanished; the dog reappeared, outdoors this time, next to a pile of logs; the dog disappeared again as the scene shifted back indoors. The finished painting is a haunting image of a table with an empty place setting and a window that looks out on newly-cut tree trunks, but the final result was less important to me than the lesson of the room: art takes work.
I was disheartened (as I almost always am) by the number of people there who spent their entire time plugged into the audio tour. I'm sure that the tour was informative, but the fact that 95% of the patrons opted for it seems to me to indicate a widespread reluctance or fear of simply engaging with art, and an inability to trust your own opinion. I'm afraid that looking down on these audio tours makes me a bit of a snob, but it makes me sad that every time I go to a major exhibition I find crowds of zombiefied people with their headphones, staring around blankly, not interacting with the art or with each other...
Here upon Earth's noonward height
To feel the always coming on
The always rising of the night:
To feel creep up the curving East
The earthy chill of dusk and slow
upon those underlands the vast
And ever climbing shadow grow
MacLeish wasn't addressing Andrew Wyeth, of course, but he may as well have been. I went to the Wyeth exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art yesterday, and I'm left with a lingering impression of room after room full of Wyeth's endless, dream-like landscape, those grey-green Pennsylvania hillsides stretching on from one painting to the next. His paintings are all unmistakably set in the same world: a world where it is always winter, where the light is always thin and pale, and where the earthy chill of dusk is ever-present and night is always just a moment away. It got a bit wearying by the end -- all the emotional intensity, the feeling of suspended animation, of waiting for something that is just about to happen, every painting like a held breath -- but I was impressed by Wyeth's ability to imbue every object with a significance greater than itself, so that a still-life that, in the hands of another artist, might have been merely a shell on a table was somehow indefinably more meaningful than that. How does one do that in a visual medium?
I was also amazed by Wyeth's ability to make paintings built around a sense of absence, where what is not in the frame is more important than anything that is. The best example of this was also my favorite piece in the show: Love in the Afternoon.
There was one room in the exhibition that was devoted to tracking Wyeth's creative process as he worked on a single painting. The room featured a series of sketches and studies for Groundhog Day, hung in chronological order along with Wyeth's own explanations of the development of the painting throughout its various stages. I was surprised to see how much his conception of the painting changed as he worked. He began with sketches of a woman sitting by a window with a dog sleeping nearby; the dog disappeared; first the table became the focus, then the view outside the window; the woman vanished; the dog reappeared, outdoors this time, next to a pile of logs; the dog disappeared again as the scene shifted back indoors. The finished painting is a haunting image of a table with an empty place setting and a window that looks out on newly-cut tree trunks, but the final result was less important to me than the lesson of the room: art takes work.
I was disheartened (as I almost always am) by the number of people there who spent their entire time plugged into the audio tour. I'm sure that the tour was informative, but the fact that 95% of the patrons opted for it seems to me to indicate a widespread reluctance or fear of simply engaging with art, and an inability to trust your own opinion. I'm afraid that looking down on these audio tours makes me a bit of a snob, but it makes me sad that every time I go to a major exhibition I find crowds of zombiefied people with their headphones, staring around blankly, not interacting with the art or with each other...
