Continuing through September 27, 2026
“The Wyeths: Three Generations” presents the work of five artists, all members of a single family, reflecting their shared preoccupations and unique talents. Alongside “My Andy: Photographs by Victoria Wyeth” (Andrew’s granddaughter, her exhibition running concurrently at the museum), we actually get four generations of artistic search, their strengths and weaknesses clarified in relationship to one another.
The best known, Andrew Wyeth, became the giant among the family in particular through the enshrinement of his iconic “Christina’s World.” That painting enjoyed both popular and critical success soon after its debut and acquisition by the Museum of Modern Art in 1948.
More space is given to works by his father N.C. Wyeth, a legendary illustrator from the turn of the century golden age of illustration in America, when it was experiencing an explosion of skill and a growing importance in books and magazines. N.C. nonetheless suffered the art world’s too common disdain for “craft.” He was raising a family, and paid his bills thanks to his mastery of magical golden hour light and the bright fantasia colors in his depictions of scenes from adventure classics and magazines. The simple but vivid hues, the theatrical emotions on the subjects’ faces and in their gestures, the romantic and morally unambiguous tone, all suit the illustrator’ tasks. Also notable are the explicitly propagandistic commissions N.C. received later in his career, such as “Untitled (Marines Landing on Beach)” (1944), when he was trying to refocus his work on the art from which he’d felt his career as an illustrator had fallen short.
The installation highlights the stylistic and thematic overlap of the father’s and son’s work. Several pieces by both are painted in the same realistic style for which Andrew became famous. These images take their inspiration from imagined moments in Revolutionary War-era America, whose lingering mythology haunted the Maine seaside where the family purchased a summer home in 1920.
Some lesser-known examples of Andrew’s work reflect his hallmark precision rendering natural materials and a more muted emotiveness as he aged. The piece closest in spirit to “Christina’s World” is “On the Edge” (2001), in which a woman stands on a cliffside, her “lost profile” looking out across the water towards a distant patch of land. Like Christina, the model Ann is thin, her skinny jeans bagging at the knees and her slight legs swimming in galoshes. But her upright stance is sturdier, like that of a dancer. The hands, so expressively haggard in “Christina’s World,” are shrewdly pocketed in “On the Edge.” Christina’s yearning is replaced by Ann’s New England reserve. Only the settings, both the sunbaked grass of “Christina’s World” and “On the Edge’s” massive granite boulder set against the frigid charcoal sea, share a similar character. Macroscopic but minutely detailed, these landscapes aren’t dramatic so much as grimly lonely.
It is improbable that any creature could thrive in Wyeth’s water, sky, or land. His is not the normal Western treatment of such landscapes; there is no sublimity in this vastness. The figure placed against it appears dwarfed, lost in a harsh, oblivious world. The younger Wyeth sympathizes with Christina’s plight; the older Wyeth and his subjects are more stoic.
Andrew’s work feels like a rejection of the sentimentality that his father was expected to deliver in his career as an illustrator, and to which Andrew’s own son Jaimie subsequently returned. Just like his grandfather, Jaimie Wyeth explored explicitly propagandistic vignettes, as in his corny Iwo Jima homage, “September 11,” (2001), or “Patriot’s Barn” (2001). Jaimie paints with less of Andrew’s compulsive precision, less of the mastery of composition of his grandfather, and aside from the jingoism, he explores more theatrically gothic themes than either. His images of children are unsettling, glowing strangely and surrounded by crows or at the center of an array of symbolic-seeming objects. He’s fascinated by Halloween. In one work Jaime paints a muddy field of rotting jack o’lanterns, in another we see a Pumpkinhead figure holding one finger up, as if he just had a thought.
N.C.’s daughter Henriette shows the same tendency to weirdness as her nephew in her portrayal of children and childhood themes. Why is the toddler’s face and head so diffuse, blanching into the grey background, compared to the nefarious-looking rocking horse she sits upon in “Ann Carol and Her Rocking Horse” (1938)? Why are the painting’s sharpest points of focus the horse’s ears, nostrils, and teeth? Why does the child look so sad?
Examining the works together leads to the uncomfortable realization that one of the great family names and greatest skillsets in American art and illustration were wielded to support some of the most mawkish, rah-rah Americana mythmaking that at its extreme nowadays looks as though it comes straight out of FOX News. We don’t expect this level of reactionary partisanship from serious art. Perhaps not all of this is the Wyeths’ doing. Surely neither N.C. nor Andrew knew the degree to which Revolutionary War lore would eventually be co-opted by the same Americans who celebrated the storming of the Capitol and voted for fascists. Post-“Christina’s World” Andrew still emerges as the sophisticate of the family. The muted emotion and opaque ideology of his later works make one wonder about the world he was depicting, rather than signaling feeble sentiment, kneejerk politics, and an uncomplicated moralism about a history that demands tougher scrutiny.
