Word: temperament
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Metropolitan Museum is bound to be successful. That, in the Met's eyes, means so jammed with people that the art will be virtually invisible. At 59, Wyeth is the most popular, perhaps the only popular "serious" artist in America. For the past 20 years his elaborately finished tempera paintings of the landscapes and neighbors around his winter farm in Pennsylvania and his summer house in Maine have become indistinguishable, for an enormous public, from a dream of vanished moral rectitude. Every split clapboard reveals the American grain; each shot deer and plucked blueberry suggests the frontier. The faces...
Embalmed with Paint. The detailed, stroked, sandpapered, flecked surface of Wyeth's tempera painting - "weaving" is his own word for it -conveys an obsessive sense of scrutiny. "I really like tempera because it has a cocoon-like feeling of dry lostness-almost a lonely feeling. There's something incredibly lasting about the material, like an Egyptian mummy, a marvelous beehive or hornet's nest." Paint embalms the objects on Wyeth's cold-comfort farms; it stresses their distance from one another and from the eye. Combined with his fondness for large legible shapes and photographic cropping...
...show covers 25 years-from Ernest Hamlin Baker's traditional tempera of a benign Winston Churchill, the "Man of the Half Century" (Jan. 2, 1950), to an atmospheric oil of a saturnine King Faisal, the Man of the Year (Jan. 6, 1975), by Bob Peak. Anwar Sadat's head is perched on sphinxlike paws in a pencil-and-ink sketch by Isadore Seltzer (May 17, 1971), while Peter Max produced a comic mixed-media collage for our "Is Prince Charles Necessary?" cover (June 27, 1969). The brooding poet Robert Lowell is given a crayoned zigzag crown of laurels...
...camera-machine is as much the tool of an artist as a paintbrush. In a photograph, the artist can use his camera to produce as wide a range of effects as he could with different brush strokes on oil, tempera or water color. Like the painter, the photographer produces these results with varied techniques and the Fogg exhibit investigates them. Here we have a chance to see and compare the daguerreotype and the calotype, photogravure and gum-biochromate; platinum, palladium and cyanotype. I don't know the chemistry or history behind all these processes, but in this exhibit ignorance...
...retrospective organized by Art Historian Wanda M. Corn at the De Young Museum in San Francisco-jam the galleries with visitors; in the U.S. only Picasso can pull more crowds than Wyeth. The price of a Wyeth watercolor begins at about $20,000, and his minutely detailed tempera paintings, of which he manages to finish about two a year, are said to have gone past $100,000 apiece...