AND NOW FOR A LITTLE HERRING ART
Source: The Wall Street Journal
N.C. Wyeth’s Deeper Aspirations
The great illustrator
N.C. Wyeth was also a fine artist touched by modernism
‘Herring!’ (c. 1935), by N.C. Wyeth. PHOTO: COLLECTION OF PHYLLIS AND JAMIE
WYETH
By
TERRY TEACHOUT
July 27, 2016 6:18 p.m. ET
Rockland, Maine
I can’t remember the last time I heard a
screenwriter, a mystery novelist or a show-tune composer express regret for
having embraced so “lowly” a calling. Nowadays, popular artists know that what
they do is valuable in its own right. It hardly seems possible that when Aaron
Copland went to Hollywood in 1939 to score Lewis Milestone’s film
version of John Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men,” many of his fellow
highbrows were sure that he was finished as a classical composer. Today, they’d
ask him for a letter of recommendation.
I thought of Copland’s film scores when I went
to see “N.C. Wyeth: Painter,” an exhibition on display through Dec. 31 at the
Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, Maine. Wyeth, who died in 1945, was the
father of Andrew Wyeth,perhaps the most famous and beloved American
painter of the 20th century. In his lifetime, though, N.C. was equally
famous—though not as a maker of what we stubbornly continue to call “fine art.”
He was, rather, the most highly paid commercial illustrator of his day. While
Wyeth is now mainly known for having illustrated such children’s classics as
“Robinson Crusoe,” “Treasure Island” and “The Yearling,” his work also appeared
on the covers of mass-circulation magazines like Ladies’ Home Journal and the
Saturday Evening Post, and in ads for Cream of Wheat and Lucky Strike
cigarettes. In those days, the mass reproduction of photographs was an
imperfect science. An artist who knew how to make bold, appealing illustrations
was always in demand, and nobody did it better than Wyeth. When he painted a
cowboy on a bronco, you could hear the spurs jingling.
But Wyeth believed
that he was squandering his great gifts. Unable to regard illustration as
anything more than “the art of journalism, to be rendered in the manner of painting,” he dreamed of being praised
as “a painter who has shaken the dust of the illustrator
from his heels!!” So he spent his spare time working on landscapes, portraits
and studies of life in coastal Maine, where he spent his summers. He saw these
paintings, which bear such homely titles as “The Harbor Herring Gut” and
“Fisherman’s Family,” as “the beginning of more important self-expression,” and
they were intended not for magazines but galleries—and, eventually, museums. By
the end of his life, he had accumulated several hundred of them, and 15, mostly
dating from the late ’20s and ’30s, are on view at the Farnsworth.
Art critics and historians haven’t had much to
say about Wyeth’s “serious” work. David Michaelis, author of “N.C.
Wyeth,” an excellent 1998 biography which argues that his illustrations deserve
to be taken very seriously indeed—a point of view now generally accepted by
scholars—wrote off Wyeth’s “independent” paintings in a single curt sentence:
“He deliberately intended these paintings to be taken as statements of his most
personal feelings, yet he left out or deflated the very pictorial elements that
made his canvases most his own.”
N.C. Wyeth. PHOTO: COURTESY
OF FARNSWORTH ART MUSEUM
To visit the Farnsworth, however, is to
realize that Mr. Michaelis got it almost exactly wrong. These burgeoningly
vital, at times near-primitive paintings, whose bold swashes of magenta and
turquoise recall the Fauvism ofAndré Derain and Henri Matisse, make
Andrew look prim. Even more to the point, they appear to have been strongly
influenced by such early American modern painters as Marsden Hartleyand Maurice
Prendergast, whose names go unmentioned in Mr. Michaelis’s book. It amazed
me to learn that an artist best remembered for his nostalgic magazine covers
seems to have known so much about the art of his time—and was eager to
incorporate it into his own work. It’s as if Norman Rockwell had
decided to take up color-field painting in his old age.
The more I think about Wyeth, the more I find
myself thinking not only of Copland, but of Bert Lahr’s celebrated performance
as Estragon in the 1956 Broadway premiere ofSamuel Beckett’s “Waiting for
Godot,” the most influential avant-garde play of the 20th century. Who knew
that the Cowardly Lion of “The Wizard of Oz” had such immortal longings in
him—or that the well-paid illustrator who painted steaming bowls of Cream of
Wheat was also capable of turning out excitingly modern canvases?
I hope that an expanded version of this show
will travel to other museums, not least because it offers so timely a reminder
of the value of artistic ambition. Yes, N.C. Wyeth’s illustrations are
marvelous in their own right. I wish he’d known how good they were. But he was
old-fashioned enough to believe that he had an obligation to aim higher, and
because he did, we have “The Harbor Herring Gut.” Like Bert Lahr, he thought
there was more in him than mere popularity—and he was right.
Mr. Teachout, the Journal’s drama critic, writes “Sightings,” a
column about the arts, every other Thursday. Write to him at tteachout@wsj.com
