Hanging outside my office is a painting that I’ve had since childhood that was done by my grandfather, Nelson.  It shows a frog poised at the edge of a pond, and another frog atop a toadstool in front of a fence.  I have an early memory of my father asking me if I could find a third frog in the picture.  When I finally gave up, he laconically told me that the third frog was on the other side of the fence. 

I am reminded of this because I have recently come back from the Andrew Wyeth exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art where I learned that a great deal of what is significant in his pictures is, so to speak, on the other side of the fence.  A pair of boots, or a coat hanging on a hook are – in Wyeth’s mind at any rate – “portraits” of their owners, the owners themselves apparently on the other side of the fence. 

Of course, what’s in Wyeth’s mind can’t be helped, but the show has got me wondering to what extent private motivations and symbols ought to be necessary to appreciate a work. However interesting the commentary is, it prevents a fresh view of the paintings head on, and to the extent that it reveals otherwise unfathomable meanings, it seems to compensate with words some failure of intentions. 

There is a painting of an old pair of boots of a lobsterman friend of Wyeth’s that reminded me of a van Gogh drawing of boots.  Is Wyeth’s effort somehow more poignant because with van Gogh, I just dumbly looked at the boots, whereas with Wyeth, I learned I am really contemplating a portrait in which the painter, upon reflection, thought the better of including the man’s thighs, torso, arms and head?

  In Groundhog Day, he set out to paint two people and a dog and ended up with a plate and a log.  I grant you this is biographically interesting, but it seems to be stretching things to an almost silly length to make this an example of composition or editing.  Editing is when you set out to do two people and a dog and cut out the dog.  If you set out to do two people and a dog and then cut out two people and a dog, then it seems to me, given the severity of things, that what’s going on here is not so much “less is more!” as it is just changing your mind. I don’t picture Wyeth thinking to himself “Simplify!”  I picture him admitting to himself: “The mammals aren’t working for me here, maybe a still-life, after all?”

  Mind you, I don’t begrudge Wyeth his own processes, doing or thinking what he must in order to paint what he feels.  It’s just that I feel alternately conned and stupid by all of this back story.  Stupid because I would have missed the symbolism of the teeth marks the dog left in the log, and conned because, after all, the dog is so to speak on the other side of the fence.  What am I, a mind reader?

  Wyeth’s paintings have a visceral narrative and emotional appeal even without commentary.  What perplexes me is how much more they have with commentary.  This leads me to think that the paintings have more power for Wyeth than for an outsider.  A lobster dory in a barn evokes feelings on its own, but it evokes a lot more for Wyeth who knew the whole sad story of its owner having to leave the water to tend the land for his parents and ailing sister and so on. 

  In “Wind from the Sea”, Wyeth talks of opening a long-closed window and having a little poetic frisson when the breeze slowly wafted to life the birds crocheted on the curtains.  I can imagine the moment, but I don’t picture it in the painting because I didn’t know the window hadn’t been open for months.  Wyeth wanted to paint the frisson, but he could only paint the window.

  The basic problem here, I think,  is a modern one where formal arts want to be narrative arts: architecture that wants to get something off its chest and music that wants to make statements, etc., art forms, in other words, that are not at home with what seem to be their intrinsic limitations.  Painting can be more easily narrative than music, for example, but neither beats, well, words.  So I’m wondering how much free commentary does a painter get, what’s the proper ratio of prose to paint before a painting starts losing points for inscrutability?

  I happily grant historic context.  And the title is fair game, I guess. But consider how much even the title can alter one’s sense of the visual.  In Wyeth’s painting Public Sale, there is a thick November gloom and a far- off crowd.  A brochure calls a pick-up truck a figurative vessel “waiting to carry away purchases from the sad event.”  But what if it were untitled, or better yet, titled “Mr. Yoder’s Annual Cider Fest”?  Would we still get sadness and gloom or just, well, November?

  Finally, I couldn’t tell whether I was at the summit of exegesis or its neighboring peak of academic spoofing when my audio guide said that, “at first glance”, I might not be able to tell that the stone tub with the bucket over it was Robin Hood dying.  The bucket, by the way, reminiscent of Robin Hood’s helmet; the draining water, Robin Hood’s blood.  My wife and I agreed that it would probably have taken us at least four more glances.  Later we came upon a house.  “Look!” I said, “Maid Marian!”

  A good guess, I think, under the circumstances.  But I was wrong.  It was just a house, albeit a very symbolic one.