Photo by Vanity Fair
Art was a way of life in my family. My grandfather, N.C. Wyeth, who died a year before I was born, had been a prominent painter. So was my father, Andrew. My two aunts and two of my uncles also earned a living as painters. I began drawing when I was nearly 3..."
Think he’s peculiar,” Andy Warhol once said of Jamie Wyeth, the ever boyish scion of America’s first family of art. “Maybe even more peculiar than I am.” Starting July 16, Wyeth’s peculiarity will be on full, panoramic display when “Jamie Wyeth,” the first retrospective devoted to his career, now in its sixth decade, opens at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.
Wyeth would seem to concur with Warhol’s assessment. “I’m an idiosyncratic and strange kind of painter,” says the artist, whose best-known portraits happen to be of Warhol (Wyeth was a Factory fixture for a brief time in the 70s), John F. Kennedy, Rudolf Nureyev, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and a 1,000-pound pig named Den-Den. For more than a century, the Wyeths of Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania (and of various islands along the Maine coast), have embodied an idyll of all-American eccentricity, from patriarch N.C.’s proto-cinematic illustrations to the forlorn watercolors of Jamie’s father, Andrew, and on to Jamie himself. “We were seen as the Flying Wallendas of paint,” Wyeth, who turns 68 this month, says of the family business, which he entered in toddlerhood, leaving school after the sixth grade to draw cubes and spheres full-time. He would score his first commission at 17, prompting no less a light than critic and balletomane Lincoln Kirstein to proclaim the teenage Wyeth the “finest American portrait painter since the death of John Singer Sargent.”
Wyeth—who is given to the breeches and waistcoats of a 19th-century dauber and whose wife, Phyllis, owns the 2012 Belmont Stakes winner, Union Rags—ultimately gave up portraiture; the 114 works in this exhibition trace his progress through an array of what he calls “loves and obsessions”: Dürer-worthy studies of ravens, leering jack-o’-lanterns that read like sly self-portraits. An earthy whimsy pervades these images, which, in keeping with family tradition, are as impish as they are macabre, not unlike Wyeth’s response to having a huge show amid the M.F.A.’s Manets and Homers: “I feel like I’m dead!” ( Vanity Fair)
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