Not all subjects of documentaries are well suited for the medium. The story of some artists can be better and more effectively told through book format. But with an artist like Andrew Wyeth, the acclaimed American painter who died in 2009, one really has to experience the sights, sounds, and other exquisite nuances of his rural environment to understand the man and his art.
In BBC’s Michael Palin in Wyeth’s World, viewers are taken to the cerebral grounds of Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, and Cushing, Maine: two locations which were home to Wyeth for his entire life, and which gave him the limitless source for his rich and productive seven-decade career as an artist.
Palin interviews friends and family members of the Wyeth’s — including Helga, the woman at the center of the famous 1985 scandal — as he saunters the coastal and rural environs where Wyeth spell bounded the American public with his extraordinary paintings.
It’s an eye-opening portrait of a man whose life was — quite frankly — rather peculiar. And, in some of its aspects, not just peculiar, but outright mystifying.
This was a man who, in his 70s, would wander freely into the Chadds Ford home of a married couple — his close friends, though it’s mildly frustrating that we aren’t told how the friendship started or evolved — and spend hours “recording and painting every detail of their daily routine.” Once he even observed them sleeping.
Wyeth’s fascination with his subjects and his desire to observe life with a curious and honed eye is, of course, something shared by virtually any visual artist. But this is just bizarre.
Yet like so many other parts of his life, what seems bizarre on the outside was sheer normalcy and the very texture which made up his existence. (Indeed the Chadds Ford couple, interviewed by Palin, were dear friends of Wyeth’s and, after a time, seem to have grown quite accustomed to him coming into the house at any and all hours.)
Wyeth’s upbringing, explored in the film, was surely a major force behind this kind of behavior — a way of operating in which life is a perpetual chance to create, capture, and internalize through art everything seen and felt.
N.C Wyeth, Andrew’s father, was an extremely talented and financially successful illustrator of history picture books. His brilliant art work was everywhere in the home. It was a place of openness in which Andrew and his four siblings were given entirely free reign to explore their creative dimensions. And instead of going to school, Andrew was tutored at home — in part due to health issues — where he continued to absorb the artistic influences of his father.
The influence was loosened, however, by the young Wyeth’s desire to discover his own artistic vision. (We learn that he took up the uncommon method of working with egg tempera as part of this breaking away.) But it was also in some sense strengthened by the death of his father in 1945, when his car was hit by a train. The tragedy gave him a greater reason to paint, as the artist himself divulged in an older interview shown in the film.
But whatever the influences, Wyeth seems likely to have become some kind of artist no matter what. His keen and often sensitive perceptions of his rural, close-knit, hauntingly beautiful world compelled him to the canvas. Among his thousands of pieces capturing that world and its people is the well-known Christian’s World (1948). Palin confesses that this beautiful, yet troubling, painting beguiles him with its flexible interpretations. But one thing seems certain: it was painted by a man who could not resist looking deeply into the drama, the awe, and the subtleties of his subjects.
In 1985, when the news broke that for the past 15 years he had painted a woman named Helga in complete secret, the scandal captured the press and art world. Helga had poised for over 200 pieces, including nudes; she was a German immigrant and married woman taking care of an ailing neighbor of the Wyeth’s. No one knew of this relationship (nor the paintings), for 15 years, including Betsy, Wyeth’s wife. This, too, was an act of Wyeth the artist utterly absorbed by the subjects of his world.
How exactly this relationship played out, and what it involved, isn’t clear. The interview with Helga in the film yields vague, meandering responses, as does the interview with Wyeth’s son. Like much of Wyeth’s life, there’s a strange haze hovering over it. It’s a haze that one might not be much inclined to try and penetrate. There’s stunning brilliance in Andrew Wyeth’s works — a cold beauty of rural American scenes — but the man himself (though apparently warm, humorous, and pleasant), is not easily relatable. Then again, many artists aren’t.
Spectatio 