Andrew Wyeth and the Transcendental TraditionAuthor(s): Fred E. H. SchroederSource: American Quarterly, Vol. 17, No. 3 (Autumn, 1965), pp. 559-567Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2710909Accessed: 20/10/2009 07:15

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FRED E. H. SCHROEDER University of Minnesota, Duluth

Andrew Wyeth and the Transcendental Tradition

ON THE LAST DAY OF FEBRUARY, IN 1860, HENRY DAVID THOREAU WATCHED

in amused and musing admiration a little boy wearing a woodchuck-skin cap. Remarking to the boy on the cap's warmth, Thoreau recorded how the boy's "black eyes sparkled, even as the woodchuck's might have done."1 Some seventy-five years later one of Thoreau's disciples, the artist N. C. Wyeth, illustrated an edition of selections from Thoreau's journals, and chose this encounter as one of the scenes to recreate in oils.2 Some sixteen years later his son, Andrew Wyeth, painted another picture, of another boy, his son, in another fur cap.3 Each picture, from Thoreau's word- miniature to Andrew Wyeth's portrait of Jamie might be dismissed as quaint trivia of Americana were it not for Thoreau's observation that "Such should be the history of every piece of clothing that we wear."4 From woodchuck's garment to boy's fur cap was no great leap for Thoreau, so long as there were an honest and consistent continuity between the wild and the domestic; so long as there were unity of nature and man, the transcendental unity which becomes the "organic principle" in the design of Louis Sullivan, the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, the city plan- ning theory of Lewis Mumford, the poetry of Walt Whitman and Robert Frost and the painting of Andrew Wyeth.

The fountainhead for this creative tradition is, of course, Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose abstract dicta provided the impetus for these Americans

1 Men of Concord and Some Others as Portrayed in the Journal of Henry David Thoreau, ed. Francis H. Allen, illustrated by N. C. Wyeth (Boston, 1936), p. 239.

2 Ibid., plate X. 3 Reader's Digest, Jan. 1964, p. 168 (reprinted from Woman's Day, Aug. 1963). Other

color reproductions of paintings referred to in this essay and the periodicals in which they appear are: Horizon, Sept. 1961, pp. 89-96, "Albert's Son," "Karl," "Tenant Farmer," "Ground Hog Day," "Nicky," "Young America" and "River Cove"; Time, Dec. 27, 1963, pp. 46-49, "Trodden Weed," "Northern Point," "Distant Thunder," "Christina's World"; Art in America, Winter 1958-59, p. 23, "Corner of the Woods"; Studio, Apr. 1959, p. 121, "Chambered Nautilus" (in black and white); Studio, Dec. 1960, p. 206, "Raccoon."

4 Men of Concord, p. 239.

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to look for inspiration in the natural objects and common men of America. The danger of misinterpretation and abusive application of the Emer- sonian principles appears right at the source, for it is not always easy for either artist or audience to distinguish between works which are quaint, picturesque, or even chauvinistic and sentimental, and those works which exemplify the paradoxical conjunction of analysis and synthesis, of the expression of wholeness by means of detail, which marks the transcendent achievement. Understandably, some will equate James Whitcomb Riley with Robert Frost, and Norman Rockwell with Andrew Wyeth. But from these superficial equations another paradox of the Emersonian tradition becomes apparent: the American artist must be a democrat. That is, his art must be "universally intelligible" 5 for the many, not privately abstruse for the few. Thus, in achieving popularity, the Emersonian artist has apparently fulfilled one of his primary functions. So, as Self-Reliance is probably still available in dime-stores as a gift book, and Robert Frost speaks at a presidential inauguration, Andrew Wyeth's pictures are avail- able at supermarket check-out stands in Woman's Day and Reader's Digest.

Yet transcendentalism, like all brands of idealism, is one of the most difficult philosophies to understand, let alone to live by. The universal intelligibility of Emerson, Thoreau, Frost and Wyeth brings to mind the anecdote of the man who, upon looking at the eye-chart, says that he can read it, but he can't pronounce it. Anyone can read Wyeth's paintings, but few, if any, can really pronounce them. Yet all these artists try to speak as plainly as they can. Thoreau apologized: "You will pardon some obscurities, for there are more secrets in my trade than in most men's, and not voluntarily kept, but inseparable from its very nature. I would gladly tell all that I know about it, and never paint 'No Admittance' on my gate." 6

Wyeth, who is conscious of an affinity with the literary artists of the Emersonian or transcendental creative tradition (I use the terms inter- changeably), has no "No Admittance" sign on his gate, as the content of his remarks in several interviews attests.7 He is quite willing to explain precisely what he is doing. But the more he tries, the vaguer, and more abstract, and more distant from the familiar detail of his paintings his remarks become. Robert Frost never had this problem, but then Robert Frost, an artist of language, never spoke an abstract word without attach- ing it to a natural symbol. Or without detaching it from the general and the vague. For example, when Robert Frost wants to tell us that "Men work together whether they work together or apart" -certainly a bodiless

5 "Art," Emerson's Complete Works (Boston, 1898), II, 333. 6 Henry D. Thoreau, "Walden" (Concord ed.; Boston, 1929), I, 18. 7 In Horizon, Sept. 1961; Woman's Day, Aug. 1963; Time, Nov. 2, 1962 and Dec. 27,

1963; Atlantic Monthly, June 1964.

Andrew Wyeth & the Transcendental Tradition 561

abstraction-he exemplifies the abstraction by attaching it to two natural symbols, a tuft of flowers and a butterfly, which he has detached from the confusion of nature in general.

Attachment and detachment. These words are keys to understanding both the purpose and technique of Andrew Wyeth's art. For the abstract principles of attachment and detachment, we must turn to Emerson, but first it would seem only just to explain the network of influences which legitimately places Andrew Wyeth in the Emersonian tradition. Wyeth is only casually acquainted with Emerson's essays, but he is steeped in Thoreau; both because of his father's enthusiasm and because of his own sincere faith in the basic simplicity of Thoreau. Further, Andrew Wyeth loves the poetry of Emily Dickinson, another follower of Emerson, and he is filled with limitless admiration for Robert Frost, which admiration was reciprocated.8 Henry David Thoreau and Robert Frost were artists who searched for the Absolute in examination of the specific and the common. That is, they concentrated their attention on the trees to discover the essence of the forest. The problem which they encounter, as we've seen before, is that the detail, the realistic detail, can blind the audience, who may not see the forest for the trees. Nonetheless, the forest is there, greater, vaguer and harder to grip than the trees. Similarly, in the detailed works of the naturalists and the localists Thoreau and Frost, there remain the principles of the abstractionist Emerson. He who can read the artists right cannot but pronounce the philosopher. Thus, Andrew Wyeth has, I think, extracted Emersonian artistic theory from the practical manifes- tations of this theory in the works of his favorite authors, and for this reason it seems reasonable to use as touchstones some of Emerson's theo- retical statements of the ideas which Mr. Wyeth is trying to communicate through naturalistic, representational painting.

"The virtue of art," Emerson wrote, "lies in detachment, in sequestering one object from the embarrassing variety. . . For every object has its roots in central nature, and may of course be so exhibited to us as to repre- sent the world."9 Detachment is Wyeth's method of selection of subject. He detaches the subject from "embarrassing variety" frequently by plac- ing the primary object against a neutral flat background. Thus "Karl" is seen from a very low viewpoint, so that the ceiling, broken only by two hooks and some plaster cracks, is the background. "Young America," again from a low perspective, has featureless gray sky-eighty per cent of the painting-and flat land as the background. A portrait of Mrs. Wyeth

8 The validity of these influences has been supported in a letter to the author from Mrs. Wyeth (Feb. 1, 1964) and acknowledged later in a letter from Andrew Wyeth Uune 27, 1964). 9 "Art," pp. 330-31.

562 American Quarterly

entitled "Corner of the Woods" shows her seated before a large gray tree- trunk which commands half the space. "Far Away," the portrait of young Jamie Wyeth in the fur cap, shows the boy seated against a hillside of dry grass. Yet another kind of detachment operates. Wyeth paints no group pictures. People are alone in his paintings, and where there are no people, then buildings, berry baskets or logs are alone. When he has two living things as subjects, they are psychologically isolated. In "Distant Thunder," the artist's wife lies with her face covered with a hat, while the dog's attention is focused on the thunder, not on its human companion. And in "Raccoon" three dogs are shown in three worlds: one, her chain drawn taut, facing left, one lost in repose in the center and one consumed in introspection. Detached. All Wyeth's subjects have an air of detachment which not only separates them from the other objects in the composition, but from artist and audience as well. Perhaps this is what prompts so many to compare Wyeth's portraits to those of Thomas Eakins. But Wyeth goes a step further, nearly always detaching the primary subject from itself. Human figures are ofttimes incomplete-"Trodden Weed," a portrait of Wyeth's boots striding on brown ground, is the most dramatic example-or they are turned away, their attention focused on something beyond our vision, as in "Nicky," where the boy has his back to us and his gaze turned indefinitely seaward; but Wyeth invests the inanimate, as well, with an air of detachment, by cutting the objects off from the whole. In "Northern Point," for example, the head of land is detached from real terra firma, the barn roof is detached from the building, and the sea, one might say, is detached from land and sky by a haze which obscures the hori- zon. In "Ground-Hog-Day" nothing is complete. The window is cut off, the table is cut off, the sunlight is cut off-even the place setting is cut off, there being only a knife beside the plate and cup and saucer!

Wyeth is often called a dramatic artist. Yet, nothing happens in his paintings, at least no action is taking place. But oddly, this air of detach- ment of his subjects is charged with drama. The drama is essentially that of tension. The inanimate "Ground-Hog-Day" is tense with the contrast of the sere and windy outdoors and the hope bespoken by the slant of sun on the warm yellow flowered wallpaper within, in addition to the unresolved chord of the incomplete place setting. This is the drama of Emily Dickin- son's:

There's a certain slant of light Winter afternoons That oppresses like the heft Of Cathedral Tunes ....

The composition of "Raccoon" evokes the dramatic tension in the chain which is pulled by a dog whose forelegs and head are off the panel, as well

Andrew Wyeth & the Transcendental Tradition 563

as in the detached air of the hound on the right, for Wyeth's introspec- tive figures are only physically at rest. The artist's wife, in "Corner of the Woods," is not at ease. She is a portrait of a working mind; not a busy mind, but a working mind. Likewise, "Karl" is physically in one room, but his ear is drawn to another place. And the little boy in "Far Away" is aware of the presence of the artist, but he is yet far away. There is tension in being neither here nor there, but both at once.

These detached subjects, Emerson said, may "represent the world." Wyeth's portrait subjects, as we have seen, are worlds to themselves, in worlds of themselves. Two of Andrew Wyeth's most popular paintings spell out this conception more explicitly. "Chambered Nautilus," prob- ably as close to genre painting as Wyeth ever got, depicts a convalescent girl seated in a tester bed in her bedchamber, thus doubly chambered. She looks out a closed window, and at the foot of the bed on a chest, lies a nautilus shell. This bed is her world, but there is a tension implied in the juxtaposition of her outward gaze and the pressure of the outside world on her bed curtains, which appear to be stirred by a breeze from another window. A treatment of the same subject, less explicit, but more dramatic is "Christina's World." In this painting the detachment of the primary objects from the "embarrassing variety" is quite pronounced: Christina is alone on a vast field, her body intent on the complement of buildings alone on the stark horizon. The featureless expanses of the composition are divided into two almost equal parts by the diagonal tension-line from Christina's feet to the house. Despite the aloneness and detachment of Christina, she dominates the composition. This is technically the result of perspective and color: the balance of empty expanse and primary sub- ject is invariably as perfect in Wyeth's work as in Chinese painting; but the significance of Christina's dominance is important, particularly since the artist said eleven years later that he might have tried now to paint the field without Christina, so that one might "sense Christina." 10

The mark of man on the land is a common theme in the transcendental creative tradition. Thoreau once pondered the death of a man, "and there is nothing but the mark of his cider-mill left.""11 Robert Frost's "The Wood-Pile" and "Ghost House" deal with similar themes. Thoreau, in a passage from the book which N. C. Wyeth was illustrating when Andrew was a boy of nineteen, described and analyzed a scene which embodies much of the drama, composition and significance of Andrew Wyeth's paintings. Thoreau had gone to Long Island to search for the "relics" of the famous woman transcendentalist Margaret Fuller, her husband and her child, who had been shipwrecked off Fire Island on their return from Italy. A body had been found the day before, and the site marked with a stick:

10 Horizon, p. 100. 11 Men of Concord, p. 45.

564 American Quarterly

I expected that I should have to look very narrowly at the sand to find so small an object, but so completely smooth and bare was the beach-half a mile wide of sand-and so magnifying the mirage toward the sea that when I was half a mile distant the insignificant stick or sliver which marked the spot looked like a broken mast in the sand. As if there was no other object, this trifling sliver had puffed itself up to the vision to fill the void; and there lay the relics in a certain state, rendered perfectly inoffensive to both bodily and spiritual eye by the surrounding scenery. . . .It was as conspicuous on that sandy plain as if a generation had labored to pile up a cairn there. Where there were so few objects, the least was obvious as a mausoleum. It reigned over the shore. That dead body possessed the shore as no living one could. It showed a title to the sands which no living ruler could.'2

Where man has passed, and left his mark, the sense of his presence is sovereign. Christina's world is the world which she has possessed; and so we can begin to understand how Wyeth might be tempted to paint Christina's world without Christina. As we shall see, his work has been coming closer to this achievement in past years.

Detachment, therefore, explains much of Wyeth's techniques of compo- sition, but detachment alone is only a trick, albeit a worthy one. Attach- ment is equally important in the transcendental creative tradition, as we've casually observed in Robert Frost's "The Tuft of Flowers." Tran- scendental philosophy is basically monistic, believing in the unity of matter and spirit, and therefore the details of nature are important only as they exemplify the over-soul, the unifying principle. In his first essay, "Nature," Emerson stated that "Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact." 13 And in later works he asserted that the task of the poet, the artist, the seer, was to restore the beauty of the unity of natural fact and spiritual fact. He said, "For as it is dislocation and detachment from the life of God that makes things ugly, the poet, who re-attaches things to nature and the Whole-re-attaching even artificial things and violations of nature, to nature, by a deeper insight-disposes very easily of the most disagreeable facts."''4 It is here that Thoreau's observations about the woodchuck and the boy become clear. He is reattaching the natural fact, the woodchuck's unity with his skin, one might say, to the apparent viola- tion of nature in the woodchuck skin's becoming an article of human clothing. The boy's warmth and his sparkling eyes make the displaced woodchuck-skin an object of beauty.

12 Ibid., p. 24. 13 "Nature," Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Centenary ed.; Boston,

1903), I, 26. 14 "The Poet," Emerson's Complete Works (Boston, 1898), III, 23.

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Tenant Farmer, tempera, 1961. From the William E. and Mary Phelps Collection, Delaware Art Center

A recent Wyeth painting, "Tenant Farmer," shows an old red brick farm house with a barren weeping willow before it, and hanging from the willow, a deer. Of this painting, the artist said, "I kept seeing the deer swing around under the willow tree, and he seemed almost to have an affinity with the building, almost, well, as if he'd lived there. And it became more than a deer shot by some damn hunter. It became a symbol to me." 15 The house is "artificial," the slain deer a "violation of nature," but to the artist there is a consistency, a wholeness about the two. In com- position, Wyeth succeeds in evoking a balanced whole despite the over- whelming weight of the color and mass of the house, which seems almost on the verge of devouring the deer, partly because the lacework of the willow tree holds in its interstices the gray sky, which characteristically in Wyeth's paintings is flat, neutral and blends with the snow. In other words, although the house has all the weight, the deer and the tree com- mand the natural background. But this does not make the deer live in the house. Two symbols do, however. In what is almost a Wyeth hallmark, a window is open and the curtain is blowing in. Like Frank Lloyd Wright's, and Thoreau's, for that matter, bringing the outdoors indoors, these win- dows and curtains join the outer natural world, whose sovereign in this picture is the hanging deer, to the man-made artificial interior.

For the second symbol, we must, like the artist, lean on the crutch of language. The painting is entitled "Tenant Farmer," and so we know that

15 Horizon, p. 88.

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Rzver Cove tempera 1958 Private Collection New York

iscr Cove, tempera, 1958. rivate Collection- -ew Yor

Andrew Wyeth & the Transcendental Tradition 567

the violated creature of nature is not an urban trophy, but something which will be ingested and digested by the man who killed it. Man and deer will be one, as boy and woodchuck became one. One sidelight: a prospective buyer's wife asked that Mr. Wyeth paint the deer out of the picture,'6 doubtless because it was a "disagreeable fact." This may seem a prototype of philistinism, yet Thoreau had been bothered by somewhat the same problem as was this woman as he watched the savagery of a hen-hawk. He concluded, "What we call wildness is a civilization other than our own. . . . So any surpassing work of art is strange and wild to the mass of men, as is genius itself." 17

One of the strangest and wildest and most abstract of Andrew Wyeth's paintings is "River Cove," which is composed of three triangular masses in the bottom four-fifths of the panel and two horizontal strips at the top, one dark and wide, one light and narrow. The lowest triangle, whose hypotenuse runs down from left to right is the shallow brown bottom of the river. The second triangle is a low peninsula of shell-littered gray mud. The third triangle is the reflected sky, the first strip the inverted reflection of dark evergreens on the bank and the highest strip is the other gray strand edging the pool. The only sign of an animal is three heron tracks. And the only man is the invisible artist through whose eyes we see. But in this rectangular composition are five depths of nature: bottom, beach, surface, sky and forest; and two depths of time, the static and eter- nal symbolized by the still water and air, and the transitory symbolized by the tracks of what has been and gone. The scene is a wild, disordered seg- ment of nature, but the artist, by stratifying the forms, has reattached the apparently ugly variety of nature and in this case has come closer to a truly transcendent unity than in any of the other works discussed here. The disordered is ordered. The sweep of nature from submarine to strat- osphere has been condensed-and with no abuse of epistemological ac- curacy-to one small rectangle of egg-tempera. Thoreau too finds Time in the strata of natural fact: "Time is but a stream I go a-fishing in. I drink of it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars."18 To reduce such abstractions as these to paint, to reattach man, nature and time to eternity, to show Christina's world without Christina; these are the tasks which Andrew Wyeth has set for himself, and with increasing sureness, he is succeeding, and drinking deeper as the stream flows past.

16 Ibid., p. 99. 17 The Journal of Henry David Thoreau, eds. Bradford Torrey and Francis H. Allen

(Boston, 1959), XI, 450. 18 "Walden," P. 109.