Andy Friedman on Andrew Wyeth

Andy Friedman, "Wallpaper, Kuerner House" (2017)

Recently, searching newyorker.com for a review of the movie Wind River, I stumbled on a wonderful piece by Andy Friedman that I hadn’t seen before. Titled “A Journey in Pictures for Andrew Wyeth on his Centennial Birthday,” it’s a sort of annotated sketchbook – beautiful watercolors of scenes and items that Friedman noted when he visited the Brandywine River Valley Museum of Art, in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, to see the “Andrew Wyeth: In Retrospect” exhibit.

I’m drawn to Wyeth’s painting. I relish its expressionistic strangeness – the absorbed microscopic way skin, hair, fur, fabric, etc. are rendered. I relish its off-kilter angles and bird’s eye views. Most of all, I relish its undertow of melancholy. Friedman touches on this when he notes that Wyeth’s Pennsylvania pictures “are painted with reticent shades of melancholy ochre.”

Friedman’s sketches reflect Wyeth’s close attention to plain, ordinary-looking things. I particularly like his depictions of the frontispiece of a light switch in Wyeth’s studio and the crumpled wallpaper in the Kuerner house. Friedman writes, “In another room, the wallpaper has shrivelled like a blossom in reverse.”

Friedman’s “A Journey in Pictures for Andrew Wyeth on his Centennial Birthday” is delectable. I wish I’d discovered it earlier. If I had, I would’ve included it on my “Best of 2017” list.