Andrew Wyeth: Looking Out, Looking In

(Hardback)

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One of Andrew Wyeth's most important paintings, Wind from the Sea, a recent gift to the National Gallery of Art, is also the artist's first full realization of the window as a recurring subject in his art. Wyeth returned to windows over the next sixty years, producing more than 250 works that explore both the formal and conceptual richness of the subject. Spare, elegant and abstract, these paintings are free of the narrative element inevitably associated with Wyeth's better-known figural compositions. In 2014 the Gallery will present an exhibition of a select group of these deceptively 'realistic' works, window paintings that are in truth skilfully manipulated constructions engaged with the visual complexities posed by the transparency, beauty and formal structure of windows. In its exclusive focus on paintings without human subjects, this catalogue will offer a new approach to Wyeth's work, being the first time that his non-figural compositions have been published as a group. The authors explore Wyeth's fascination with windows - their formal structure and metaphorical complexity. In essays that address links with the poetry of Robert Frost and the paintings of Edward Hopper, Charles Sheeler and Franz Kline, the authors consider Wyeth's statement that he was, in truth, an 'abstract' painter.

Reviews

The absorbing new Wyeth exhibition, "Andrew Wyeth: Looking Out, Looking In," is in certain respects the opposite of the Helga show, even something of an exorcism of it. Where the Helga show was dominated by a single human figure, the current exhibition is entirely without people, except for a couple of preparatory sketches... Instead of such cacophonous material, the current show is built around a single, quiet motif in many variations: the window.

The result of the carefully concieved installation, in which preparatory studies are grounded around more finished and often drastically simplified paintings, is an increasingly immersive experience, an aesthetic revelation rather than prurient one. The catalog essays, by National Gallery curators Nancy Anderson (on Wyeth's working process) and Charles Brock (comparing Wyeth's windows to two influences, Edward Hopper and the Pennsylvania precisionist Charles Sheeler), are understanded, inquisitive, and well written...--Christopher Benfey "The New York Review of Books"