美国国家公共电台 NPR 'Fascinating And Also A Little Bit Uncomfortable': Andrew Wyeth At 100

SCOTT SIMON, HOST:

2017 marked a hundred years since Andrew Wyeth was born. His "Christina's World" is one of the most iconic American paintings of all time, right alongside "Whistler's Mother" and Grant Wood's "American Gothic." Karen Michel reports that the centennial is an occasion to reassess the artist's work.

KAREN MICHEL, BYLINE 1: In 1977, nearly 30 years after "Christina's World" was painted, art critic Robert Rosenblum was asked to name the most overrated and the most underrated artists. He put Andrew Wyeth in both categories.

MICHAEL KOMANECKY: Robert Rosenblum's comment is accurate to a degree but also simplistic.

MICHEL: Michael Komanecky, chief curator at the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, Maine, is often asked to weigh in on Wyeth.

KOMANECKY: Andy has been described to me as, oh, the critics treat him so badly. Well, it's not at all true. He enjoyed a tremendous critical reputation for decades.

MICHEL: Though not so much anymore, in part because of Wyeth's tremendous commercial success. The Farnsworth has an entire center devoted 2 to the work of Andrew Wyeth, his father N.C. and Andrew's son, Jamie. The museum's collection of Andrew's work shows a range that's broader than the seemingly literal realism of his familiar paintings, with their fine brushwork, muted palette and depictions of his rural neighbors. Here, there are watercolors of coastlines with energetic, impressionistic brushstrokes and a bright palette. These are surprises, which curator Komanecky says is the point.

KOMANECKY: What do you say about Andrew Wyeth at 100? Well, he had many great moments in a long career. He is, in my estimation and that of many other people, he's one of America's great craftsmen 3. This man could draw.

MICHEL: Unlike his contemporaries, Andrew Wyeth didn't see the work of grand masters in museums at home or abroad and never studied in New York. Wyeth was home-schooled by his illustrator father in Pennsylvania, and he painted the people he knew there and his neighbors in Maine where he later had a home. But the artist's familiarity with his subjects didn't make for warm and fuzzy images. They're cold, distant. Viewer and artist become complicit voyeurs 4. Museum of Modern Art curator Laura Hoptman finds the effect creepy.

LAURA HOPTMAN: It makes you uneasy. I mean, for some particular reason, there's a kind of niggling perfection that is both fascinating and also a little bit uncomfortable. But at this thing, he was the best at it. He was truly a master.

MICHEL: It's at Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art than Andrew Wyeth's most famous work is on view, not in a gallery with other works but in a hallway beside a bank of escalators. Still, "Christina's World" has become a sort of pilgrimage site for fans, like Richard Burrow 5 from Roanoke, Va.

RICHARD BURROW: I've seen many, many pictures of this painting, but I've never seen the actual original.

MICHEL: The rural scene depicts 6 a field, an awkward woman in a pink dress propped 7 up on spindly arms, seen from behind gazing at a house and barn in the distance.

BURROW: I think she's thinking about leaving and taking a long look back at home and the life that she is leaving. I don't know if that's what the artist had in mind or not (laughter). But it's always been sort of how I felt about it. She's torn about whether to go or stay.

MICHEL: The woman was Anna Christina Olson. She was physically 8 disabled, and Wyeth had seen her crawling across a field. MoMA's Laura Hoptman, using Wyeth's word for Olson's disability, says the artist was clear about what he wanted to show.

HOPTMAN: The Museum of Modern Art, when we buy work by a living artist, we send the living artist a questionnaire, and we sent Wyeth one. And he was very forthright 9 about the fact that he was painting a person who was horrifically crippled, I think he said, but that he wanted to make sure that this was not a painting specifically about a crippled person - that it was a painting about - in a way about aspiration 10.

MICHEL: The Museum of Modern Art acquired "Christina's World" in 1948 for what was then a huge sum - $1,800. Farnsworth Art Museum curator Michael Komanecky says Wyeth was creating something different from his peers.

KOMANECKY: Andrew Wyeth painted "Christina's World," and it was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art. Within 12 months of that acquisition, there is an August issue of LIFE magazine with Jackson Pollock on the cover, and the feature story is, is Jackson Pollock America's greatest living painter? Within 12 months, those two works of art represent the absolute polar opposites of what is happening in American art at that moment.

MICHEL: And maybe that's why "Christina's World" is hanging in a hallway instead of around the corner in a gallery with the Pollocks. For NPR News, I'm Karen Michel.