I'll pass on the question of whether the Jamie Wyeth retrospective at the Museum of Fine Arts (through Dec. 28) merits the prime real estate. The museum obviously thinks so, and Globe art critic Sebastian Smee, who I usually agree with, very clearly does not. But the exhibition is definitely worth seeing, even if you're not one of the masses who are familiar with Wyeth's lineage - his grandfather was the great illustrator N.C. Wyeth, his father was painter Andrew Wyeth. There are some quite wonderful paintings here, and even some of the not-so-wonderful stuff isn't boring.
The Wyeths' ubiquitous presence in 20th century American art has a slightly comic resonance in my family. For many years we harbored a vague and apparently false belief that we were somehow distantly related on my mother's side to Christina Olson of Andrew Wyeth's famous painting Christina's World. When I was a boy my parents dragged me along on a visit to Cushing, Maine, to see the house in that bleak painting - what fun for a kid!
And my mother still grumbles when she catches sight of her copy of the large-format paperback catalog to an Andrew Wyeth exhibit at the MFA circa 1970; a visiting teenager with a pen scribbled a couple of phone numbers on the cover circa 1980, and the vandalism rankles her to this day.
Jamie is 68 now and due for a retrospective. This being Boston, they had to hang his posthumous Portrait of John F. Kennedy, which has just become part of the MFA's permanent collection. Wyeth was just 20 when he received the commission, and it's a fine portrait I suppose, but it seems rather much like all the other paintings I've seen of JFK, dignified and thoughtful yet sort of flat, as if any artistic spark was extinguished by the pall of tragedy.
It's a less interesting work, anyway, than Portrait of Shorty or Portrait of Helen Taussig, both painted, astonishingly, when Wyeth was just 17. These two pictures are vivid and alive and intense in character. Portrait of Shorty (below) applies his father's realism and washed-put palette, but has a rich weirdness all his own; it's one of the very best pieces here. There's also a portrait of Andrew Wyeth in which he wears a strange, monklike tonsure. It's a picture full of resonances that are hard to unpack.
Collection of Andrew and Betsy Wyeth. © Jamie Wyeth., Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
There was a lot of stuff here that I found meh at best. Other than Lou Reed, has there ever been an artist whose work was improved by hanging around with Andy Warhol? Wyeth's portrait of Warhol and his other 1970s pictures are the exhibition's weak links, i.e. the rather pointless one of Ahhhhnold flexing. And who thought it was a good idea to include Wyeth's two tableaux vivant - dioramas, basically - of scenes from life chez Warhol? Bizarre.
After that, though, everything improves, as most of the work comes from Wyeth's beloved Maine coast or rural Pennsylvania environs. There's a constant push/pull between his desire for an idealized, "pretty"take on the rural past, exemplified in loving portraits of his wife, Phyllis, in period garb, often driving horses (Connemara Four) and a bleaker take that shows the shadow of his father's work (Head Tide-Maine). I'll take the latter, as the prettier pictures are sometimes nothing more.
But of course the best works are the most individual, which may touch on his father's rather grim view or his grandfather's storytelling, but always skewed just a little off what you'd predict. Sometimes this shades toward cute, as in the many affectionate animal pictures here or Pumpkinhead - Self-Portrait, which, sue me, I love. But Wyeth is at his best when he's ambiguous going toward dark. That means works like Orca Bates (below), a nude portrait of a adolescent Mainer with a whale's jawbone hanging over him; the jawbone reappears in a picture of Jamie's wife called simply Whale. The jaw is an artifact his grandfather might have made use of in illustrating some pirate tale, and the palette seems to be his father's, but the pictures are definitely his. The wristwatch!
Courtesy Chrystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas. © Jamie Wyeth. Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Which brings us to the gulls. I am boggled by people who really dislike Wyeth's paintings of seagulls, a frequent subject of his later work. He is quoted here as saying, "the eye of a gull, that's limitless, that's more the ocean than any big seascape," and that's exactly what comes across to me. The ferocity on display in his Seven Deadly Sins series, in Sea Star or even the oversized, off-species Raven presents slashing, staring, flailing nature that's red in tooth and claw and feels more like his own vision than anything else in the exhibit.
Just a couple of weeks ago, a painter friend here in Newburyport was taking the ferry back to shore after a visit to Maine's Monhegan Island when a black power boat rather abruptly crossed their bow. "That's Jamie," he was told. Wyeth's weakness, it seems, is that he's all over the place.
LEFT: Envy - The Seven Deadly Sins
Jamie Wyeth (American, born in 1946)
2005
Watercolor and gouache on toned, hand wove rag paper mounted on archival board
*Private Collection
*© Jamie Wyeth
*Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
ABOVE:
Artist Jamie Wyeth with his painting Portrait of John F. Kennedy in the Lois and Michael Torf Gallery at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston on June 23, 2014. With art object: Portrait of John F. Kennedy Jamie Wyeth (American, 1946)
1967
Oil on canvas
*Partial gift of Phyllis and Jamie Wyeth and partial purchase. © Jamie Wyeth. *Photograph © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Portrait of Shorty
Jamie Wyeth (American, born in 1946)
1963
Oil on canvas
*Collection of Andrew and Betsy Wyeth. © Jamie Wyeth.
*Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Orca Bates
Jamie Wyeth (American, born in 1946)
1990
Oil on panel
*Courtesy Chrystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas. © Jamie Wyeth.
*Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
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