The New Yorker & Me: Andrew Wyeth's "Helga" Paintings: Schjeldahl v. Updike

Introduction

What is The New Yorker? I know it’s a great magazine and that it’s a tremendous source of pleasure in my life. But what exactly is it? This blog’s premise is that The New Yorker is a work of art, as worthy of comment and analysis as, say, Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Each week I review one or more aspects of the magazine’s latest issue. I suppose it’s possible to describe and analyze an entire issue, but I prefer to keep my reviews brief, and so I usually focus on just one or two pieces, to explore in each the signature style of its author. A piece by Nick Paumgarten is not like a piece by Jill Lepore, and neither is like a piece by Ian Frazier. One could not mistake Collins for Seabrook, or Bilger for Goldfield, or Mogelson for Kolbert. Each has found a style, and it is that style that I respond to as I read, and want to understand and describe.

Monday, June 24, 2019

Andrew Wyeth's "Helga" Paintings: Schjeldahl v. Updike

Andrew Wyeth, "Farm Road" (1979)

Peter Schjeldahl’s specialty is rhapsody, not annihilation. But he can be annihilating when he wants to be. Look what he says about Andrew Wyeth:

Wyeth isn’t exactly a painter. He is a gifted illustrator for reproduction, which improves his arid originals with slick surfaces and kicked-up color. In person, the works present expanses of moisture-starved pigment. Moving your eyes across them is like sledding on gravel. [Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light, 2019]

Andrew Wyeth isn’t exactly a painter? Come on! Look at his superb Farm Road (1979). It’s among the works – the Helga paintings – Schjeldahl is referring to. Look at the absorbed way that massive braided head is painted, every glowing filament laid on in painstaking tempera.

Andrew Wyeth, "Black Velvet" (1972)

Look at Black Velvet (1972), another Helga picture. John Updike said of it,

Among the finished paintings, Black Velvet seemed to me a triumph: a long nude, tawny white, reclines in space as black as the velvet ribbon around her neck. She is an American Venus, with something touchingly gawky in her beautifully drawn big bare feet, bent elbow, and clenched hands. [Just Looking, 1989]

I agree with Updike. Wyeth’s avid, detailed rendering of Helga is a mimetic tour de force. Schjeldahl’s opinion is shockingly wrong-headed.