Wyeth’s windows brim with the quiet strength of the people absent from their frames. That’s especially true of “Wind from the Sea,” painted in 1947 at his wife’s friend Christina Olson’s farmhouse. The artist had been staring out an open third-floor window in an abandoned room when a wind shook the tattered curtains. He later described the crocheted birds on them, which he captured so carefully, as being “as delicate as the real Christina,” a woman who weathered polio but resolutely shunned the use of a wheelchair (she is the subject of Wyeth’s 1948 painting “Christina’s World”).
Seen together, the paintings are themselves windows into Wyeth’s poetic mind, reflecting the dual preoccupations of a largely misunderstood artist. Though critics chided Wyeth for his conservative realism, he always insisted he was an abstract painter, pointing to the same kind of thoughtful, underlying design at work in these images. “I can’t work completely out of my imagination,” he once explained. “I must put my foot in a bit of truth, and then I can fly free.” |