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A window on Wyeth’s world

Exhibit highlights artist’s point of view

“Wind from the Sea” by Andrew Wyeth is the centerpiece of the exhibition “Andrew Wyeth: Looking Out, Looking In,” on view at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., through Nov. 30.
Chuck Myers McClatchy-Tribune

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Celebrated American artist Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009) liked to look out on the world through his art, figuratively and literally.

And he most often did this by depicting windows in his work.

More than 300 of his renderings, in various media, featured windows.

Wyeth’s interest with his immediate outside world and conveying inner thought, as framed by a home portal, is at the heart of a special exhibition here at the National Gallery of Art.

“Andrew Wyeth: Looking Out, Looking In” features about 60 of the artist’s works, on view at the National Gallery through Nov. 30.

An intensely private person, Wyeth created imagery instilled with remarkable detail and a special meditative air.

One hot summer day in 1947, Wyeth planned to make some sketches of a window from inside the attic of the Olson house near Cushing, Maine. Suddenly, a breeze lifted a thin lace curtains through an open window. At that moment, Wyeth found his inspiration for “Wind from the Sea.”

Wyeth had met Christina Olson and her brother Alvaro years earlier, and spent several summers sketching rooms in their family home. In 1948, he painted his iconic “Christina’s World,” showing the young woman, who suffered from a degenerative muscle condition, from behind and on the ground, peering toward the house.

The window, flowing curtains and outside landscape fill a tight space in “Wind from the Sea.” The tempera piece also exhibits a high level of visual precision that Wyeth mastered early in his career.

Accompanying pencil and watercolor preparatory drawings flank the central focus, and offer insights into Wyeth’s working process. One sketch of the window space in “Wind from the Sea,” for instance, actually overlays a study of Christina in profile that Wyeth had produced previously.

Nearby, “Olsons’ Front Door” (1954) feels as forbidding as it does inviting. The doorway is in disrepair, as was much of the Olson home. As you approach and view the opening, you can almost feel a sense of uncertain anticipation.

When National Gallery curator Nancy K. Anderson and associate curator Charles Brock started exploring “Wind from the Sea,” they also found that many of his other works, beyond Maine and the Olson house, likewise included or focused on windows.

The exhibit does not follow a chronological line per se, but rather spotlights works produced in locales where Wyeth lived and worked.

Often, a brilliant ethereal light illuminates Wyeth’s scenes.

The gently lit warm palate of “Groundhog Day” (1959) seemingly invites visitors to take a seat at the simple table setting in the painting, and spend a few moments considering the same tight, yet somewhat menacing landscape seen through the kitchen window at the Kuerner Farm in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania.

In his watercolor “British at Brandywine” (1962), created at his studio near the Revolutionary War battlefield in Brandywine, Pennsylvania, sunshine passes through a window and spotlights four small toy soldiers on the windowsill. But of the quartet, one particular soldier stands out. Unlike the neutral tones used to depict the other three soldiers, one figure in color strides away from the others with a life-like human motion.

While Wyeth carefully employed sunlight to set a mood, he could flood a scene almost entirely in light as well. Different gradations of white dominate the complex “Rod and Reel” (1975), which shows a fishing pole and reel lying outside a sunbathed window. The lower third of the window’s glass reflects a landscape, and holds the work’s main concentration of color.

Wyeth studied his subjects intensely. He paired down details in his creative endeavors to their purest and sparse essence. Moreover, his art possessed sophisticated layering in its mathematical calculation and personal history.

“Off at Sea” (1972), found in the exhibit’s final gallery, was born initially from watercolor sketches Wyeth produced of young boy sitting in a vestibule of a church in South Thomaston, Maine, with his back turned to an adjacent window. But a coat hanger in the composition is what drew Wyeth’s attention.

Wyeth removed the boy from the setting, and recast the work into a geometric painting, altering the image space from a horizontal to a square.

Among Wyeth’s most austere works, “Off at Sea,” with its empty coat hanger and soft light that passes through the cloudy sky beyond the window, becomes a rumination about loss and death.