painting windows: andrew wyeth at the national gallery of art

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P R E V I E W I N G U P C O M I N G E X H I B I T I O N S , E V E N T S , S A L E S A N D A U C T I O N S O F H I S T O R I C F I N E A R T

ISSUE 15 May/June 2014

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Andrew Wyeth: Looking Out, Looking In By James D. Balestrieri

p a i n t i n g

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w i n d o w s

Left: Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009), Spring Fed, 1967. Tempera on Masonite, 27½ x 39½ in. Collection of Bill and Robin Weiss, © Andrew Wyeth.

Right: Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009), Off at Sea, 1972. Tempera on panel, 33¾ x 33½ in. Private collection, © Andrew Wyeth.


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Like any business, but maybe a little more so, the art business has its sayings, its insider adages,

old chestnuts, to wit: “We should look as good as this painting does when we’re this old,” and “Of the 200 paintings Corot did, 400 are in the States.” Like all sayings, these have their grain of truth. One saying in particular, heard most often among art dealers, bears directly on the exhibition Andrew Wyeth: Looking Out, Looking In, at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., from May 4 through November 30: “The frame is 40 percent of a painting.” In practice, when applied to mediocre works, this saying has merit. The right frame can improve an indifferent canvas, though

the percentage would be tough to quantify. But a good painting, or a great one? Here’s where the adage falls apart. Good paintings—I can already hear the protests—don’t really need frames at all. Good paintings—indeed, all paintings—come with their own frames. Window frames. For what is a painting but a window—a window on the world, into the imagination, a framed slice of another world, an alternate and ultimately unique universe? To paint windows within the window of the painting, as Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009) does in the paintings featured here, is to call attention to what happens at the edge of the canvas, at the point where the artist’s frame meets the outside

world, and bring the concept of point of view to the forefront. Through the device of the window frame, Wyeth multiplies the worlds in these works in order to make viewers intensely aware of their eyes and of the selectivity of seeing as it relates both to our incessant forming and reforming of the present moment and our need to locate ourselves in time and space—the past—through the act of remembering.

Wind billows the lace curtains inward. They brush you, move your eyes to the open window, to the twin ruts of the path that leads to and from the line of shore and blade of sea at the bottom left of the window frame. You want to take that path in Wyeth’s 1947

Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009), Wind from the Sea, 1947. Tempera on hardboard, 18½ x 279⁄16 in. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., gift of Charles H. Morgan, © Andrew Wyeth.


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painting Wind from the Sea. You want to take it because the wind seems to want you to take it. But the path ends outside the house. The house is a barrier. You want; at least, to see more of the sea, but you can’t, not from here. The painting won’t allow it. Look left of the narrow shore and your eyes come to the veiny cracks in the plaster at the edge of the canvas. Dry. Like a tiny dry riverbed. The opposite of what you want. What can you do? You can remember the sea, how it looked the last time you were there, and you can yearn for it and imagine how it will look when you see it once again.

The window in The Pikes is small and dark, set high in a stone wall weathered by centuries. It’s a cyclopean eye or a mouth in a tight square o. The creeping shadow seems to serve as some sort of primitive sundial and you wonder what will happen—what might happen, what must—when the shadow engulfs

Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009), Rod and Reel, 1975. Watercolor on paper, 21½ x 29½ in., Dr. and Mrs. James David Brodell, © Andrew Wyeth.

Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009), Frostbitten, 1962. Watercolor on paper, 16 x 23½ in. Private collection, © Andrew Wyeth.


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the pikes. You want to turn that bucket over and stand on it on tiptoe and peek inside. But at what? At some chained beast? At some scene out of the distant past or distant future? This window isn’t a window at all: it’s a door. Only, as in

all good science fiction—something out of Lovecraft, perhaps—it isn’t a door, it’s a portal.

Andrew Wyeth told his biographer that the 1967 painting, Spring Fed, was inspired by the thoughts of the death

of one of his childhood heroes, Robin Hood. He imagined Robin laid out here, the sound of the running spring water, the earth’s lifeblood, standing in for the life of the hero, running out. Wyeth might have been thinking of

Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009), Widow’s Walk, 1990. Tempera on panel, 48¼ x 433⁄8 in. Private collection, © Andrew Wyeth.


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his father here, the great N.C. Wyeth, painter of Robin Hood, Long John Silver, and King Arthur and so many heroes that still find a place in the minds of boys and loom large in the memories of those of us who were once boys. Perhaps, then, this is why there are so many layers between us and the early spring revealing itself under the snow on the slope outside. The layers of apertures and the muntin bars between the many panes jail us in and the bucket on the wall at right, mouth out and down, makes any sound ring and echo hollow and tinny. Only the open window through the open door, looking out on the cows, offers any respite, any avenue for memory, any access to spring, to youth. You want to find your old copy of Scribner’s Robin Hood or Treasure Island, and read.

In Off at Sea and Rod and Reel

(painted in 1972 and 1975, respectively), Wyeth uses light to fold windows into mirrors. In each, our eye believes, at first, that it is looking out. A second later, we realize that we are looking at windows from the outside, but instead of seeing in, the windows reflect what is behind us. To look in or out a window and find that the window mirrors what’s behind you, what you have turned away from is to ask what you’ve missed and what you miss.

The empty hanger in Off at Sea signals someone’s absence, a sailor or a fisherman who hangs his wet coat on the hanger when he comes home. When combined with the gray, billowing sky, narrow strip of land and the tiniest suggestion of sea reflected in the lower left corner of the window (very much in keeping with Wind from the Sea), the scene suggests that there is no turning

away from the longing to fill that absence. Squares of light on the long, empty bench only reinforce the essential loneliness of the moment.

If anything, Rod and Reel articulates an even deeper sense of aloneness. With the shade half pulled, looking in is half-denied, and the mirror that the window has become reflects a fairly desolate world. Even the green of the reflected hill is infused with the unrelieved gray of the sky and the pond is fenced off. This window also reflects another window in a building across the way, leaving us trapped between reflections, flat and one-dimensional. The fishing tackle offers some promise of adventure and camaraderie, but a closer look shows that this is old gear, antique, and that there are two rods but only one reel. And there are no hooks, no lures, nothing to suggest that anyone

Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009), Evening at Kuerners, 1970. Dry brush, 25½ x 39¾ in. Private collection, © Andrew Wyeth.


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Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009), The Pikes, 1965. Watercolor on paper, 28 × 19 in. The San Diego Museum of Art, gift of Mr. and Mrs. Norton S. Walbridge, © Andrew Wyeth.


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has fished here in a long time. Fishing here is, at best, a memory; at worst, it’s a symbol of a long gone past.

To look out a window is to long to be there instead of here, then—future then, past then, both?—instead of now. To look out a window is to find the present wanting, hollow and unsatisfying. To look out a window is to say, “I wish.” Perhaps it’s a wish to be younger, or older. Or simply to be out in the fresh air rather than indoors. But to look in through a window is to indulge the thrill of curiosity, to long to know what’s in there and add whatever lies within to one’s store of knowledge and experience. Unless it isn’t. Unless it’s a desire for comfort or a desire to hide, to be safe inside, secure. To look in through a window is to imagine, to project, to see yourself, another self, there.

In these three stanzas from As I Walked Out One Evening, W. H. Auden captured in words what Andrew Wyeth is after in his paintings of windows:

‘O plunge your hands in water,Plunge them in up to the wrist;

Stare, stare in the basin,And wonder what you’ve missed…

‘O look, look in the mirror,O look in your distress,

Life remains a blessingAlthough you cannot bless…

‘O stand, stand at the window,As the tears scald and start;

You shall love your crooked neighborWith your crooked heart.’

To look out or in through a window is to long. To paint is to long. To look at a painting is to long—to long to be different, elsewhere, to long for a

second chance, to long to know that you still have one more in you, to long to share in the artist’s impulse to make art and to live in the hope that your joy, anger, sorrow, pain might one day gel into a painting, a sculpture, a string quartet, a punk rock anthem, that it might become a play, a film, or a rhyming couplet instead of vanishing as it morphs, one emotion into the next, leaving you wondering why it doesn’t gel and when and whether it will. What is painted is the longing. Wyeth’s windows are the stained glass of memory.

Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009), Room in the Mirror (study), 1948. Watercolor on paper, 22 x 30 in. Private collection, © Andrew Wyeth.

Andrew Wyeth: Looking Out, Looking In

On exhibit May 4-November 30 at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., www.nga.gov.


painting windows: andrew wyeth at the national gallery of art

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