We live our lives partially in secret: the secrets we keep to ourselves and the ones we ask others to keep for us. The long artistic life of Andrew Wyeth—born in 1917, painting by 15, dead at 91 in 2009—is a portrait of a man forever wrangling with secrets. In Andrew Wyeth: In Retrospect, the secrets are hidden in landscapes, anchored to weather-beaten rowboats moored in fallow fields, and etched in the bends of grass blades.
A bottomless grief for his father’s traumatic death is perhaps Wyeth’s earliest secret, one he explores through heavy symbolism in Winter 1946. Local boy Allan Lynch is seen running down a hill in rural Pennsylvania, toward unseen train tracks where he is about to discover the car with Wyeth’s father and his young nephew’s mangled bodies pressed inside. The earflaps of Lynch’s aviator-style hat and the coattails of his hand-me-down oversized soldier’s jacket fly askew as his shadow lengthens behind him.