The Son of N. C. Wyeth and Some Lady

So there I am in the Andrew Wyeth exhibit at SAM. Everyone around me
is 100, and I am ready to look at seven paintings and touch them with
my brain and form a brand-new Wyeth-shaped brainwrinkle (it has
pigtails). I am ready! Andrew Wyeth died this year, SAM’s wall tells
me, “leaving a legacy of deeply personal paintings that nevertheless
have shown, through their enduring and wide popularity, that they have
the ability to touch us all.” So what you’re saying here, wall, is that
Andrew Wyeth is popular because he touched us, and he touched us
because he’s popular? We like him because we like him? He is beloved…
because he is our beloved! And there I am and everyone is 100 and it’s
just so goddamn fusty and I’m already annoyed. But Andrew Wyeth,
I am to discover, semihappily, is not fusty. Andrew Wyeth is
toootally perverted and creepy! And you love him, America, because
you’re perverted, too. Even if you’re 100. Do not deny it!

Andrew Wyeth was born in 1917 in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, the son
of N. C. Wyeth and some lady. The elder Wyeth was a prominent
illustrator—a realist, like his son—and
protégé of Howard Pyle, the man who invented what pirates
look like. (Scarves! Boots! A billowing pantaloon!) Due to his frail
and illin’ constitution, young Wyeth was homeschooled, leaving him
ample time to study art with his father and develop a love for the
hills and moments around Chadds Ford that would dominate much of his
career. He married a woman named Betsy and painted her many times. In
1945, N. C. Wyeth’s car stalled on some train tracks, and that was the
end of N. C. Wyeth. Andrew Wyeth never stopped being sad. His paintings
are, weirdly (getting to that), mainstream American institutions: They
hang on the set of Mr. Rogers, in Snoopy’s existential doghouse,
in the living room on Step by Step (!?).
M. Night Shyamalan
based his execrable film The Village on Wyeth’s bleak
Pennsylvania aesthetic. Wyeth’s Wikipedia page also reveals that he
recently received an award and a hug from George W. Bush. Wyeth
eventually died while sleeping, of being old. That was in January of
this year.

Of the seven paintings in SAM’s Andrew Wyeth: Remembrance,
five are from his Helga studies: a body of 247 works painted between
1971 and 1985 (plus one final addition in 2002). The subject is Helga
Testorf, a severe, pale-eyed German beauty, and Wyeth painted
her—in secret from his wife and Testorf’s husband—in
various nude and clothed and intimate and creepy ways for YEARS. The
Helga paintings are contextless: Black Velvet (1972) is a
reclining nude floating in a plush, bottomless black depth—like
space, or sea. She could be dead. Her pelvic bone juts. Farm
Road (1979) stares, too close, at the back of Helga’s head as she
ascends, askance, a bare brown hill toward a stand of lonesome trees.
Braids from 1979 (which you have lately seen on SAM’s posters
all over the goddamn city) places Helga, in three-quarters profile,
again in front of that black vacuum, her face unsettling and brooding
(SO MUCH BROODING!). Taken alone, each might be pretty. Taken together,
the effect is unsettling. Everything seems dead, even the alive things.
It’s actually scary.

Wyeth’s technical skill is astounding—I basically had to shove
my face into the painting and through the wall to believe that Black
Velvet was a watercolor. These pieces are fucking magnificent. But
the prettiness is a trap.

“Painting was his way of giving forms to memories,” the wall says. A
couple of 100-year-old biddies walk around, talking about Wyeth and
Helga and love. “He had to love her,” one biddy gushes. “Wyeth’s
realism was a means to an expressive end,” the wall continues. “A way
of securing fleeting and elusive sensations.” Is anyone in here paying
attention? These paintings are terrifying, biddies! These are
paintings of obsession, not love—powerful and icy,
hyperdetailed, joyless. And gorgeous, of course. Meticulously
gorgeous.

The voice of reason comes from Wyeth himself, in the placards
accompanying each painting. Instead of more curatorial boilerplate, SAM
has paired each image with a quote from the artist, which range from
actually-­kind-­of-­awesome self-­aggrandizement (to
paraphrase, because it’s funnier: “You guys, this is like my BEST
PAINTING EVER!”) to confirmations of exactly the visceral human
creepiness I’d suspected all along. “I always remembered the hair on
the back of her head,” he says of Farm Road. “That spot on the
back of her neck where the hair would start… I peered at this part of
her deeper and deeper. I became enamored of that spot.” Yeah, dude! I
know you did! And then, taking it all the way: “Of course, there’s a
penetrating and throbbing sexual feeling in all the Helga pictures. I
felt the country, the house, Germany, the dreamy moist rich female
smell—the whole thing.” The candidness is a relief. Love and
biddies be damned—Wyeth is one of us.