Books, Arts & Manners: But Is It Good?

I WAS prepared to dislike Andrew Wyeth for all the usual reasons. Having seen his paintings and watercolors in reproduction, I assumed they were all posing, melodramatic crowd-pleasers. I remembered the whole Helga incident of a few years back, in which nudes of a woman who may have been his mistress were shrewdly parlayed by dealers into an orgy of mid-cult vulgarity. The “informed” opinion was that Wyeth was the world’s greatest Sunday painter, the sort of hobbyist who gets a bowl of apples to look like a bowl of apples, and then wins first runner-up at the local bank.

But now, after seeing Wyeth’s landscapes in the flesh at the Whitney’s new exhibition, “Unknown Terrain,” I feel compelled to revise my assessment. More than that, I would go so far as to say that the almost universal scorn that has been heaped on this beleaguered painter over the past half-century is one of the most disheartening acts of critical injustice in the whole of the recent literature on art.

JG

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James Gardner

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I WAS prepared to dislike Andrew Wyeth for all the usual reasons. Having seen his paintings and watercolors in reproduction, I assumed they were all posing, melodramatic crowd-pleasers. I remembered the whole Helga incident of a few years back, in which nudes of a woman who may have been his mistress were shrewdly parlayed by dealers into an orgy of mid-cult vulgarity. The “informed” opinion was that Wyeth was the world’s greatest Sunday painter, the sort of hobbyist who gets a bowl of apples to look like a bowl of apples, and then wins first runner-up at the local bank.

But now, after seeing Wyeth’s landscapes in the flesh at the Whitney’s new exhibition, “Unknown Terrain,” I feel compelled to revise my assessment. More than that, I would go so far as to say that the almost universal scorn that has been heaped on this beleaguered painter over the past half-century is one of the most disheartening acts of critical injustice in the whole of the recent literature on art.