Jamie Wyeth

James Browning Wyeth (1946--) is a contemporary American realist painter. He was born in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, son of Andrew Wyeth and grandson of N.C. Wyeth. He is artistic heir to the Brandywine Tradition, painters who worked in the rural Brandywine River area of Delaware and Pennsylvania, portraying its people, animals, and landscape.

Childhood/ Early career

James “Jamie” Wyeth was the second child of Andrew and Betsy Wyeth, born three years after brother Nicholas (an art dealer later). He was raised on his parents farm “The Mill” in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, in much the same way as his father had been brought up, and with much the same influences. Early on, he showed the same remarkable skill in drawing as his father did at a comparable age. He attended public school for six years and afterwards was privately tutored by his family, concentrating on art.

At age 12, Jamie studied with his aunt Carolyn Wyeth, a well-known artist in her own right, and the resident at that time of the N.C. Wyeth home and studio, filled with the art work and props of his grandfather. In the morning, he would study English and history at his home and in the afternoon go to the studio and join other students in learning the fundamentals of drawing and composition. He stated later, “She was very restrictive. It wasn’t interesting, but it was important.” [’’An American Vision: Three Generations of Wyeth Art’’, Little Brown and Company, Boston, 1987, ISBN 0-8212-1652-X, p. 57]

With advice from his father, always his closest friend but always frank, Wyeth quickly developed his technique and style. In 1963, at the age of 17, he painted "Portrait of Shorty", a bravura picture of a local railroad worker. Two years later, he lived for a few months in New York City, to better study the artistic resources of the city and to learn human anatomy from visits to the city morgue. He met Andy Warhol, and later in the 1970’s, the two did portraits of each other. During this In 1966, at 19, he had his first one-man exhibition, at the Knoedler Gallery in New York. Through his acquaintance with the Kennedy family, he was commissioned to do a posthumous portrait of John F. Kennedy. Both Robert Kennedy and Edward Kennedy posed for Wyeth, and he studied photographs and films of the deceased president for three weeks. [’’An American Vision’’, p. 157] He captures JFK early in his presidency, perhaps in a moment of doubt or indecision over the Bay of Pigs Invasion, with the burden of power weighing on him. Jackie Kennedy thought the portrait accurate but RFK and other family members did not like the less-than- triumphal depiction. The painting did not hang in the White House, and after stays at the French embassy in Paris, France and Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, it found its permanent home at the Kennedy Library. Through great public acceptance, it has become one of the most famous images of JFK. [’’An American Vision’’, p. 157]

From 1966 to 1971, Wyeth served in the Delaware Air National Guard. Wyeth took part in “Eyewitness to Space”, a program jointly sponsored by NASA and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, designed to record details of the United States space program, including making studies of the launch preparation and of the astronauts. He was admitted to the U.S. Senate and Supreme Court to record in detailed drawings the proceedings regarding the impeachment of President Richard Nixon, including the tense courtroom scenes in Judge John J. Sirica's trial of John D. Erlichman, G. Gordon Liddy, and other Watergate defendants.

In 1968, Wyeth married Phyllis Mills, one of his models, who had earlier been permanently crippled in a car accident and is the subject of many of his paintings, usually showing her seated, including "And Then into the Deep Gorge" (1975), "Wicker" (1979), and "Whale" (1978), as well as, by implication, his painting of Phyllis’s hat in "Wolfbane" (1984).

His "Portrait of Andrew Wyeth" (1969) shows only the ruddy face of his father, and the large buttons of Andrew’s naval coat, with all else in black, as if Andrew was just arriving home fresh from a brisk walk by the sea.

Wyeth's work became more widely known after being shown alongside his father's and grandfather's art at an exhibition in 1971 at the newly opened Brandywine River Museum at Chadds Ford, the foremost repository for all the Brandywine artists. A highlight of the show was Wyeth’s "Portrait of Pig", a seven by five feet painting befitting its subject’s size and status.

In New York during the 1970’s, he painted Andy Warhol at his “Factory” as well as Rudolf Nureyev, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and President-elect Jimmy Carter. Apart from visits to New York, his primary subjects in the 1970’s and 1980’s were the people, animals, and landscapes of his Pennsylvania home and of Monhegan island in Maine, where he bought the Lobster Cove property of Rockwell Kent, famed illustrator of his grandfather’s generation. During this period, he painted some of his most famous animal portraits, "Angus" (1974), "Islander" (1975), and "10W30" (1981). His self-portrait "Pumpkinhead--Self-Portrait" (1972), depicting a figure in black standing in a field with a pumpkin over his head, is as self-effacing as his father’s self-portrait "Trodden Weed", (1951) showing only Andrew’s legs from the knees down. In 2002, he followed up with another humorous self-portrait "Pumpkinhead Visits the Lighthouse" (2000).

Wyeth was invited to the Soviet Union in the summer of 1975 to tour the country’s art, and he took the opportunity to meet with dissident artists. In March 1987, Wyeth traveled to Leningrad to attend the opening of "An American Vision: Three Generations of Wyeth Art", a major exhibition of 117 works whose rural subjects proved very popular with the Russian people.

In the last two decades, Jamie Wyeth has been presented at over two dozen exhibitions throughout the United States and abroad. He moved to Southern Island at the mouth of Tenants Harbor in the early 1990s to secure more privacy and lives there in a lighthouse. Much of his output since then comes from that locale. Wyeth’s fascination with island life is revealed in its more disturbing form in "If Once You Have Slept on an Island" (1996) which depicts a young woman sitting on a tousled bed who appears sad and exhausted from wild dreams. The title was derived from a poem by Rachel Field with the opening lines:"If once you have slept on an island,You'll never be quite the same."

Other noteworthy commissions in addition to his portrait of JFK have been the design of one of the 1971 eight-cent Christmas stamps, the official White House Christmas cards for 1981 and 1984, and the Eunice Kennedy Shriver portrait for use on the 1995 Special Olympics World Summer Games Commemorative coin. He also lent his support to lighthouse preservation efforts in Maine in 1995 with his exhibition, "Island Light".

Jamie Wyeth has illustrated two children's books, "The Stray" (1979), written by his mother Betsy James Wyeth and "Cabbages and Kings" (1997), written by Elizabeth Seabrook.

tyle and technique

Early on, Wyeth became interested in oil, his grandfather’s primary medium, although he became extremely adept in watercolor and tempera, his father’s preferred media. In describing his aunt’s way of thickly applying oil to her palette, he stated, “I could eat it. Tempera never looked particularly edible. You have to love a medium to work in it. I love the feel and smell of oil.” [’’An American Vision’’, p. 57] In addition to studying his aunt’s oil technique, he also admired his father’s and grandfather’s work, and that of Howard Pyle, his grandfather’s teacher, as well as American masters Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins. What inspired Wyeth most was not the subject matter or technique of his grandfather, but his “sense of total personal involvement with and intuitive grasp of his subjects”. [’’An American Vision’’, p. 57] Jamie Wyeth adopted a wider palette of colors than his father’s and closer to his aunt’s and grandfather’s.

Wyeth’s artistic reach is broader than his father’s and grandfather’s. He excels in drawing, lithography, etching, egg tempera, watercolor, and mixed media. Though grounded in this family’s artist tradition and subjects, and bound by the same solitude of his art, his wider travels and experiences have shaped a more rounded artist. In travels to Europe, he studied the Flemish and Dutch masters, and learned the intricate and exacting process of lithography, producing a substantial amount of graphic work.” [’’An American Vision’’, p. 160]

On portrait painting, Wyeth stated, "To me, a portrait is not so much the actual painting, but just spending the time with the person, traveling with him, watching him eat, watching him sleep. When I work on a portrait, it's really osmosis. I try to become the person I'm painting. A successful portrait isn't about the sitter's physical characteristics--his nose, eyeballs and whatnot--but more the mood and the overall effect. I try not to impose anything of mine on him. I try to get to the point where if the sitter painted, he'd paint a portrait just the way I'm doing it." [Sandra Carpenter and Greg Schaber, ‘’Jamie Wyeth: His Art and Insights,’’ The Artists Magazine 14, no. 8 (August 1997), p. 38.]

Jamie Wyeth’s critics level some of the same charges as they do against his father—to some, both artists seem anachronistic, too close to illustration, and out of touch with the 20th century evolution of Post-Picasso modernism. He answers, "We're charged, my father and I, with being a pack of illustrators. I've always taken it as a supreme compliment. What's wrong with illustration? There's this thing now that illustrations are sort of secondary to art and I think it's a bunch of crap." [David Kinney, ‘’The Grandson Also Rises,’’ The Wilmington News Journal (6 February 1998), D2.] But supporters see Wyeth art as timeless, accessible, grounded in classical technique, and purposefully devoid of fadism.

Museums and awards

Wyeth’s work is featured in the Brandywine River Museum, the Farnsworth Art Museum, the Terra Museum of American Art, the National Gallery of Art, the National Portrait Gallery, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

In 1972, Wyeth was appointed a council member of the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1975, he became a member of the board of governors of the National Space Institute. He is a member of the national Academy of Design and the American Watercolor Society. He holds many honorary degrees including from Elizabethtown College, 1975, Dickinson School of Law, 1983, Pine Manor College, 1987, and others.

References

* [http://www.tfaoi.com/newsmu/nmus82f.htm Jamie Wyeth: Proteus in Paint]
*"Jamie Wyeth" Houghton Mifflin Company 1980 ISBN 0-395-29167-4

External Links

* [http://www.artnet.com/awc/james-wyeth.html Jamie Wyeth catalogue in artnet's "Artist Works Catalogues"]