Anatomy of America

Reading the obituaries of painter Andrew Wyeth after his death last Friday, I had a crisis of confidence.

The art establishment hated Wyeth for much of his career. He was a regionalist and a realist when the vogue was abstract expressionism, a plainspoken farmer among chain smoking wildmen. He was the country mouse; they were the city mice. He had nothing new to show them, and they had no time for him.

The thing was, though: everyone else loved him. Wyeth was the first artist to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1963, and the farmhouse depicted in his most famous single work, “Christina’s World,” is the only building to make the National Register of Historic Places for being the subject of a painting. No one less infamous than Richard Nixon, toasting Wyeth at the White House, said that his paintings “captured the heart of America.”

This is where I start to have problems.

I really believe—and heck, my column is premised on it—that there is such a thing as a national sensibility. This singular, essential taste guides our behavior not just where art and entertainment are concerned, but also in government, politics, law—in everything.

All the discord surrounding Wyeth made that seem a little foolish. Is it really possible to “capture the heart of America?” You can make the argument that, if anyone could, Wyeth did. He took for his subject none other than the great American landscape. His subjects were plainspoken farmers, windswept grasses, people who worked hard and took pride in sacrifice. You know, Amurricans.

But what about progress? What’s more American than that? Rob Storr, the dean of the Yale University School of Art, called Wyeth “anti-modern,” and the posthumous consensus is that he gave the “silent majority” that were his fans the illusion of an America that no longer existed. Wyeth did his best-remembered work in the post-WWII 1940s, when America was just testing its strength as a world power. America had growing pains, and Wyeth was prescribing the opiate nostalgia.

I have to say, though, that I don’t just see nostalgia in Wyeth’s paintings. I happened to be in New York the day he died, and was able to spend a good, long time in front of “Christina’s World,” which the Museum of Modern Art has held since 1949. Christina was a real acquaintance of Wyeth’s, and following a childhood illness was paralyzed from the waist down. She refused to use a wheelchair, and instead grabbed and crawled her way through the physical and metaphoric world. In the painting we can see only her back, laid out on the yellow grasses, tending all the force of her mind and body toward the gray, dilapidated farmhouse at the top of the long hill. This is not an ideal of the way life once was, but rather, at least as I see it, a parable of just dealing with it, which Wyeth happened to set in the fields of Pennsylvania that he knew and loved.

Of all the comparisons between Wyeth and other regionalist/realists of the period—Winslow Homer, Norman Rockwell—the best is to Edward Hopper. As the abstract painter Mark Rothko put it, “Wyeth is about the pursuit of strangeness, but he is not whole, as Hopper is whole.” I can accept that Wyeth is perhaps not the best of his contemporaries. But that they passed him by entirely? Never.

I’m with Rothko on this one. Wyeth chose representation, Rothko chose abstraction, but at bottom their work expresses that common, shared experience of not really being sure what America is anymore.

Bear with me, but it took yesterday’s inauguration to cure me of my doubts once and for all. I grew up in Nebraska, where the prairies are broad and the minds are narrow. Or so I thought. My hometown, which comprises Nebraska Congressional District Two, split the state’s electoral votes for the first time, and gave one to Barack Obama, as blue a Democrat as ever dared to take on the Red Sea of the Midwest.

I won’t try to make a far-fetched analogy between Wyeth and Obama, but I will say that I am heartened by that one electoral vote. On Nov. 4, my hometown and I looked at America and picked Obama to lead it. Some might see America as a Wyeth painting, some might see it as Rothko, but in the end we all came to the same conclusion. Calling Wyeth “America’s painter” is a stretch, but whether his critics would agree or not, I am willing to grant him common footing with the most outré expressionist of his day. In other words, I’m back to believing.

Thank goodness.


Jillian J. Goodman ’09, a Crimson arts writer, is an English concentrator in Quincy House. Her column appears regularly.