"Or is something else going on?"

Andrew Wyeth, Night Hauling (1944)

I’ve just finished reading Alexander Nemerov’s “The Glitter of Night Hauling: Andrew Wyeth in the 1940s” (included in Rethinking Andrew Wyeth, 2014, edited by David Cateforis). Its opening paragraph is thrillingly good:

How do we account for the strangeness of Andrew Wyeth’s art of the 1940s? How, that is, beyond discerning the surrealist undertones, finding the magic realist affinities, or seeing that Wyeth followed in a Brandywine tradition whose oddity was firmly established by the art of Howard Pyle: lone pirates on desolate shores; magicians and curly-shoed dwarves; Revolutionary War officers strolling down streets so detailed (down to every last timber, shop sign, and grass blade) they make your head swim? Is the young Andrew Wyeth only an inheritor of that tradition, updating it in a modernist-inflected manner for the 1940s, and might we leave it simply at that? Or is something else going on? Consider Night Hauling, a painting Wyeth made in 1944 showing a lone man on the ocean at night, furtively stealing from a lobster trap amid twinkling and gleaming pours of phosphorescence.

For me, that “Or is something else going on?” is an excellent kick-starter for almost any form of critical writing. It questions traditional approaches, and leads to more imaginative responses. 

Michael Fried, in his brilliant Realism, Writing, Disfiguration(1987) approaches Thomas Eakin’s The Gross Clinic in a similar way, arguing against the “blandly normalizing” realist reading of The Gross Clinic. Fried’s theory doesn’t convince me; neither does Nemerov’s, but I find their strange over-the-top analyses exhilarating. As Janet Malcolm says in her “The Purloined Clinic” (The New Yorker, October 5, 1987), a review of Fried’s book, 

Criticism as radical as this is rare, but only when criticism is radical does it stand a chance of being something more than a pale reflection of the work of art that is its subject. By disfiguring the work of art almost beyond recognition, Fried forces us to imagine it anew – not a bad achievement for a critic.

It all begins with that subversive question: “Or is something else going on?”