Welcome to one fine show, where Observer highlights a recently opened show at a museum outside New York City, a place we know and love that already receives plenty of attention.
I have written of my love for the newest Alex Katz paintings on these pages before. It’s satisfying to see someone who captures the beauty and strangeness of human life turn his attention to a depopulated world of botany. It feels pure, the trees entering the organic brain and emerging so changed, as the painter seeks to capture not only how they look but how they are experienced. It makes you start to think of painting as another curious emergence of the environment, strange but natural as a stalactite or a spiderweb.
There’s something similar going on with “Every Leaf & Twig: Andrew Wyeth’s Botanical Imagination,” a new show at the Bruce Museum that features nearly thirty-five works on paper from the holdings of the Wyeth Foundation for American Art. The show takes its name from a line in Walden and, like that memoir, seeks to demonstrate what a person can get up to alone in the woods—a fitting juxtaposition for an artist Jerry Saltz once called “a very particular strain of American: As intellectually independent as he was stylistically conservative, a family man with a streak of cruelty, a son with something to prove, and possessing a nose-to-the-grindstone attitude of ‘I did it my way.'”
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The work of Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009) on the subject of nature is hard to talk about as generally, for he seems to embrace the chaos one finds there, and lets that take the lead on his works—something seen in Starflowers (2004), a piece that hinges on the irregular growth of these roadside buds, which are nearly consumed by the surrounding grass. This impulse to capture nature at the expense of composition or clarity began early, as seen in Buttonwood, Study for The Hunter (1943). Since it’s unfinished, you can see the way Wyeth built it organically with drybrush. He would do a branch when he felt like doing that, but capture the leaves on whiteness when he felt like doing those, detailing bark in no context, with no associated wood, if he felt called to capture it.
His drawings would grow as the botany would, but beyond verisimilitude, he was able to use nature to conjure a great deal of drama and emotions. Cool Hunter Study (1941) offers a dense, confident abstracted thicket, but it shares just the same tone as Coot Hunter (1937-1943), which can be found in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. In that work, the hunter looks in the distance, lonely but efficient as he strides with his quarry.
Have you seen Christina’s World (1948) lately? It’s one of those paintings that you might not remember well. You might think that you can see Christina’s face, anguished, but you can’t. You might even think that Christina takes up most of the frame, but she doesn’t. Even the house is smaller than you remember. The painting is mostly grass, oppressive grass that seems to stretch on forever. Then it meets another kind of grass. It’s a key part of the work because it demonstrates nature’s own internal narrative and its indifference to us.
“Every Leaf & Twig: Andrew Wyeth’s Botanical Imagination” is on view at the Bruce Museum through January 5, 2025.
