The Road to Friendship View more images

"Andrew Wyeth: Early Watercolors" is a return to a celebrated artist's enchanted beginnings. As in many a fairy tale, though, the artist's magic cuts both ways.

Born in 1917 in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, in the Brandywine River Valley, Wyeth spent a privileged and protected childhood. He was the most talented son and pupil of N.C. Wyeth, a celebrated illustrator at a time when illustrators were household names. For N.C., the home and studio in the rolling Brandywine hills were a kind of fortress, a refuge from the commercial world of illustration he was never quite able to escape.

Young Andy was far luckier. He had his first solo New York show, a sell-out success, in 1937, at the age of 20. His 1948 portrait of a summer neighbor, "Christina's World," made him nationally famous. Acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in 1949, it became one of the best-known paintings in American art. Later, he was the first native born, living American to have a retrospective at The Metropolitan Museum.

The 52 watercolors and two temperas in the show at the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester, New Hampshire, (through January 10, 2005) were made just before and for a decade and a half after Wyeth's New York debut. Large in scale and in spectacularly pristine condition, they are a virtuoso performance.

In 1937, some critics hailed Wyeth as the successor to Winslow Homer, America's greatest watercolorist and one of the country's most commercially successful fine artists. The comparison was not unjustified. Breathtaking in their effortless brilliance, these works show that Wyeth was not only fully versed in the grand traditions of 19th-century watercolor but he was also able to move beyond them.

Big Spruce View more images

Wyeth's best known paintings are in tempera, a medieval term for pigments based in various water-based binders, especially egg whites. Wyeth uses the demanding medium with an almost Gothic meticulousness -- tight, carefully placed strokes in an airless, shallow space. By the 1940s, his palette grows browner and grayer, until his landscapes seem to fall into a perpetual mid-December, with a hint of snow in the air.

In the Currier watercolors, though, Wyeth indulges in bold washes of color. "Florida Swamp" (1939), has the tropical emeralds and aquas that Homer loved so much. "Tree Stumps" (1937) and "Big Spruce" (1938) are full of autumnal oranges and March Orchard (1938) covers the foreground with plum-colored fallen leaves. Wyeth's loose, energetic, almost Japanese brushwork skirts close to the abstract. The rich orchestration of technique, color, and subject matter make these images deeply satisfying, despite the sense of loneliness and melancholy that lingers over them.

But it is in the subject matter that the troubling signs begin. Apart from the very early Florida pictures, made on a research trip with his father, Wyeth restricts his artistic territory almost entirely to that enchanted Brandywine River Valley and the coast of Maine near Port Clyde, which he had visited since youth. His models are close friends, neighbors (including a Chadds Ford community of African-Americans), and family. The scenes feature things and people he has known all his life.

With very rare exceptions, this forms the terrain of Wyeth's career. It is as if, in some profound way, he has never been able to leave the safe, idyllic castle his larger-than-life father provided. Even more disturbing are the strange distortions of time. Except for an occasional telephone pole, it is as if the 20th century never happened. There are no crowds, no cities, and no highways. Fishermen move by oar, not outboard. Interiors are set with kerosene lamps, braided rugs, and Victorian rockers.

Compare Andy's subjects with those of Edward Hopper, an artist born the same year as Andy's father. Hopper has deep roots in illustration, in Homer (like Hopper, an illustrator in his early career), and in the great watercolor tradition. Hopper's work has the same crusty individualism. Here, too, are the feelings of alienation and isolation. There are the white Victorian houses and the New England seacoast. There is the deep Americaness of the art.

Jack-In-The-Pulpit View more images

Yet the mature work of Hopper, a painter of cities as well as the woods, is thoroughly modern. Even in his country scenes, there are gas stations, cars, advertisements, and the random junk of American life. And, though he never reaches Wyeth's virtuoso command of his media, Hopper's unforgettable images are the ones that seem to fix his time and place for the centuries.

In 1937, Andy was very much in the mainstream of American art. Realistic Regionalism was the national style and -- often with Depression Era government funding -- serious artists had been making watercolors in every corner of the country.

By 1950, however, everything had changed. Pollock, Rothko, Gorky, and a host of other artists just a bit older than Wyeth had abandoned naturalism for Abstract Expressionism. American art became an international phenomenon. Watercolor as a medium for important work went out of fashion -- abandoned to the illustrators and the Sunday amateurs. The bucolic Brandywine is now cut up by traffic-clogged highways and strip malls. Andy Wyeth seems not to have noticed.

There is still a huge audience for the older tradition, of course. The Wyeths, picking up on old N.C.'s career management talents, have made the most of it. They have made art into a kind of family business, extending the franchise into a third generation and cultivating a few sympathetic museums, most of them on familiar family turf, to show and preserve their works.

Ironically, though, N.C., who was long utterly eclipsed by his son's enormous fame, is now making the strongest claim to immortality. As an illustrator of such beloved children's literature as "Treasure Island," N.C.'s bold, swashbuckling fantasies have lost their Arts and Crafts fustiness. His works have a classic feel that Andrew, trapped in the dead end of 1930s Regionalism, so far lacks. Yet even Regionalism is coming back in style. Given more time, Andrew Wyeth's brilliance may shine through once again. Until then, the enchanted artist sleeps, awaiting his time.

"Andrew Wyeth: Early Watercolors" is on view at the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester, New Hampshire through January 10, 2005.

MORE ARTS HEADLINES

	Curtains for Boston Costume			"So Much, So Fast"
	Anything But Ordinary			Roller Rink on Thin Ice

		Arts Features Films at the Gate Photos See photos of kung-fu movies and former Boston Chinatown movie theater locations. Guerrilla Art See photos of local artist Matthew Hincman's bench-like sculpture. "O" is for Original Local artist "Danny O" portrays whimsical scenes of summer in Boston. Multimedia Singer at 100 An exclusive online special explores the controversial work and life of Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer. Gauguin's Tahiti Paintings Take a multimedia tour of Paul Gauguin's Tahiti paintings, including the famous painting, "Where Are We From." Hawthorne at 200 View a multimedia celebration of Nathaniel Hawthorne's 200th birthday.