Art: Disarming Realist

To conservative academicians, the name Wyeth looked good, and always had. Young Andrew Wyeth’s watercolors lacked the fine, romantic lunge which had made his father, the late N. C. (for Newell Convers) Wyeth, a top U.S. illustrator of children’s books. But they were even more disarmingly realistic than N.C.’s paintings had been. Last week the American Academy of Arts and Letters announced that it will give its 1947 Award of Merit Medal (and the $1,000 which goes with it) to Andrew Wyeth. The Academy makes its award to a painter only once every five years (1942 winner: Veteran Charles Burchfield).

Though he is only 29, Andrew has been painting for 17 years. He left school at twelve to study in his father’s Chadds Ford, Pa. studio with his artist sisters, Carolyn and Henriette (whose husband, New Mexico’s Peter Kurd, is also a painter). Andrew had his first one-man show at 20. He sold every painting in it, and has since found buyers for almost everything he paints.

Never a prodigy, Andrew had gradually learned to hit off the look of what he saw without apparent effort. Now his technique has become as unobtrusively slick as that of Surrealist René Magritte (see above). And for an age when storytelling in paint is frowned on even by academicians, Andrew’s pictures are suitably storyless. His sharply sunlit Afternoon (on exhibition with 17 other of his paintings at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts last week) looks as pleasant, and as posed, as a vacation snapshot.