Jamie Wyeth

As famous, and sometimes famously controversial, as the three generations of Wyeth artists have been, the artistic vision of Jamie Wyeth (born 1946), considered separate from the context of his family, remains surprisingly little known. This retrospective, the first in more than 30 years, presents a full range of work from his earliest virtuoso portraits to his most current mysteriously symbolic seascapes. Jamie Wyeth’s early exposure to painting in his father Andrew Wyeth’s studio, his youthful immersion in Andy Warhol’s Factory and the New York art scene of the 1970s, and his continuing dialogue with artists past and present combine with his artistic imagination to create an elusive, hybrid form of realism that ranges from sharply observed portraits of historical and cultural figures, to personified animals and animated landscapes, to a vision of an inferno set on Maine’s Monhegan Island. By exploring the themes and subjects central to Jamie Wyeth’s vision, the authors place him in the context of his own distinguished artistic heritage as well as the long tradition of American realist painting and its contemporary revival. The more than 100 paintings, works on paper and multimedia assemblages lavishly reproduced in this book invite us to explore the world of a prodigiously gifted, adamantly individualistic American artist.

A new solo retrospective at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, which opens July 16 and continues through December 28, shows Wyeth venturing into the modern era without ever violating the introspective idiom he seemed to command nearly from birth. His portraits of public figures such as JFK, Andy Warhol, and Rudolf Nureyev emphasize their inner lives. His landscape Patriot's Barn could fit almots indistinguishably alongside his father's spare off-season farmscapes, until you notice that it was painted in 2001, a couple of months after the destruction of the World Trade Center: Wyeth captures the impact of the event, registering even at this remove the sense of a country turned upside down, on an empty hillside at the far edge of autumn. (Kevin Conley Town & Country)