C14| Saturday/Sunday, March 7 - 8, 2020 **** THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.
NEWELL CONVERS WYETH,better
known as N.C. Wyeth (1882-1945),
was in later life a mountain of a
man—over 300 pounds—and was
also a sierra of talent and personal
troubles. Known more these days as
the patriarch of a family of artists
(most prominently, his son Andrew),
he began as a precocious illustrator,
and painted a bucking bronco cover
for the Saturday Evening Post when
he was only 20 years old. Wyeth
went on to illustrate classic editions
of “Treasure Island,” “The Last of the
Mohicans,” and a kids’ version of the
tale of King Arthur. Mostly, he fa-
vored what he called “true, solid,
American subjects—nothing foreign
about them.”
Yet Wyeth also painted as a fine
artist. He dabbled in Impressionism
early on, but in succeeding decades
segued to realistic American Region-
alism. Wyeth was not as successful as
he would have liked. In 1907, his en-
try in the Pennsylvania Academy of
the Fine Arts annual exhibition was
rejected. Thirty-two years later he
had his first solo show (at the age of
57) at the prestigious Macbeth Gal-
lery in New York, but it didn’t sell
well, and the critics wrote more
about his family. (Andrew had en-
joyed a one-person exhibition of wa-
the flapping birds and slithering her-
ring, the power of nature. Tempera is
a dangerously stiff medium, but Wy-
eth uses it to create a ruggedness
that’s equal to what lesser painters
obtain with easier-to-use oil paint.
“Dark Harbor Fishermen” may not be
as spectacular as “Island Funeral,”
but it’s more haunting in its unsenti-
mental visualization of a workaday
drama.
A year after his rejection by the
Pennsylvania Academy, Wyeth grum-
bled that “painting and illustration
cannot be mixed—one cannot merge
from one into the other.” The pain he
felt by his “easel painting” not being
considered the equal of his efforts for
book and magazine reproduction
never went away. Nor did Wyeth have
a happy life. He was raised by a domi-
neering, even cruel, mother; fell in
love with the wife of his eldest son,
Nathaniel; may or may not have had
an affair with her; and died when his
car, stopped on railway tracks, was
rammed by a train. The accident also
killed his 4-year-old grandson. Specu-
lation that Wyeth’s death might have
been a suicide has never quite abated.
These tragedies notwithstanding,
Wyeth’s home and magnificent studio,
with a huge window for north light, in
Chadds Ford, Pa., are a National His-
toric Landmark that testifies to his
enduring artistic legacy. This exhibi-
tion and especially such paintings as
“Dark Harbor Fishermen” affirm him
as much more than an illustrator. Jus-
tice with artists is often a strange and
complicated matter.Mr. Plagens is an artist and writer in
New York. PORTLAND MUSEUM OF ART, PORTLAND, MAINEBYPETERPLAGENS
BYPETERSAENGER
tercolors at the same gallery two
years earlier.) He complained in his
30s that he’d “bitched [him]self with
the accursed success in skin-deep
pictures and illustrations.” The feel-
ing of slight never left him.
Two of Wyeth’s paintings are in-
controvertibly great. “Island Funeral”
(1939), owned by the Brandywine
River Museum of Art in Pennsylva-
nia, is the picture usually cited as
Wyeth’s best: a wonderfully imagined
aerial view (a perspective we take for
granted these days, when drone
shots permeate television dramas) of
boats and people arriving for the cer-
emony. For me, though, the real as-
tonishment is “Dark Harbor Fisher-
men” (1943), a picture roughly three
feet square, painted in the difficult-
to-control, quick-drying medium of
tempera on rigid panel. It’s in the
collection of the Portland (Maine)
Museum of Art, and part of an exhi-
bition—“N.C. Wyeth: New Perspec-
tives”—now on view at the Taft Mu-
seum of Art in Cincinnati.
In the painting, which depicts the
view looking down from a pier, a
fisherman in the nearest foreground
scoops herring—bait for bigger fish—
into a bushel basket steadied by an-
other’s hand. Close behind him, a
third man waits his turn (his skiff
contains an empty basket), and in the
distance a fourth fisherman ap-Everyday Life in
Perfect Balance
proaches in his own little rowboat.
The day is still dark, but seagulls
hover close.
The compositional structure is an
X, with three skiffs aligned pointing
upward to the right, while the ap-
proaching skiff’s prow points in a di-
rection that crosses diagonally
through them. The three-to-one im-
balance of the boats is pictorially
corrected by the direction of the
bench that sits in the second-nearest
boat. The small edge of the dock at
the bottom of the painting crops the
composition nicely. A colony of hun-
gry gulls tugs the whole arrangement
to the upper right, while a single
large bird (almost a portrait) anchorsthe lower left. If Wyeth could do
nothing else, he could compose a pic-
ture in a manner as sturdy and force-
ful as the men who worked the coast
of Maine.
While chromatically subdued,
“Dark Harbor Fishermen” contains an
essentially primary-color configura-
tion at its center: red (the vigorous
brown of the side of one of the
skiffs), yellow (the basket-holder’s
waders and, less emphatically, the
floor of his craft), and blue (the hull
of the same). White—the sum of all
colors in light—effectively implies, inHaunting in its unsentimental
visualization of a workaday drama.REVIEW
MASTERPIECE|‘DARK HARBOR FISHERMEN’ (1943), BY N.C. WYETH
made around 1100 B.C., records the
dowry of 400 acres of land given by
a father for his daughter’s wedding.
(The stone also records a vow by
the bride’s new father-in-law not to
claim the land for himself.)
A charming 4.5-inch statuette of
a noble-looking dog, a symbol of
good health, has a removable con-
tainer for medicinal herbs in its
back. Help for the sick could also
come from supernatural sources
like the demon Pazuzu, who is
represented in a rather fright-
ening bronze statuette with
four wings, talons, a scorpion
tail and a head that mixes the
features of a human, a dog
and a lion.
By the time Alexander the
Great conquered Mesopotamia
around 330 B.C.—an idealized
sculpted head of Alexander is in
the exhibition—the region’s glory
days were behind it. The Babylonian
empire gave way to the Greeks and
Romans, who would be more impor-
tant influences on the modern
world. But Mesopotamia’s wonders
lived on in legend and scripture, as
well as clay and stone.structed a processional route with
more than 100 ceramic panels
showing roaring, striding lions. The
Getty’s panel, a riot of blue and
gold, white and gray, is about 3 feet
tall and more than 7 feet wide.
The show makes room for evi-
dence of daily life as well. The claytablets on view include maps, a re-
ceipt for 15 “garments in good con-
dition,” a dictionary and a model es-
say for students to copy. A
cuneiform inscription on a rock,A
sked what he wanted
for his 11th birthday,
Timothy Potts begged
for books about an-
cient Mesopotamia—
an early sign of the passion that
would lead him to a distinguished
career as a Near Eastern archaeolo-
gist and historian. Now director of
the J. Paul Getty Museum, Dr. Potts
returns to that first love as co-cura-
tor of a new exhibition, “Mesopota-
mia: Civilization Begins,” opening at
the Getty Villa in Los Angeles on
March 18. The show includes more
than 200 objects that conjure the
texture of life in the ancient region,
from sculptures of kings, demons
and dogs to brilliant ceramics and
cuneiform inscriptions.
Mesopotamia, which lies between
the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers in
what is now Iraq (the name comes
from the Greek for “between riv-
ers”), was one of the birthplaces of
civilization. Since recorded history
began there around 3100 B.C., the
area witnessed the invention of cu-
neiform writing as well as the first
major cities and codes of law. The
city of Uruk, with more than 60,000
inhabitants, flourished around 3000
B.C., when Europeans were just get-
ting started on Stonehenge. Later
Mesopotamian metropolises are fa-
miliar from the Bible, such as Nin-
eveh and Babylon, where a tall
ziggurat or stepped tower is
thought to have inspired the
story of the Tower of Babel.
The theme of firsts governs the
new show, which is divided into sec-
tions such as “First Cities,” “First
Writing” and “First Kings.” From
the Uruk period comes a 1-foot-tall
limestone statuette of a nude man—
possibly a king, Dr. Potts says, who
was depicted without clothes as a
sign of humility. A millennium later,
in the 2100s B.C., Prince Gudea of
the southern Mesopotamian city of
Lagash left behind many statues in
his image. “Gudea With the Vase of
Flowing Water,” standing 2 feet tall,
evokes the ruler’s role as a protec-
tor of the fertility of the land. It
shows the prince wearing a cap dec-
the statue is dedicated to Geshti-
nanna, the goddess of life-giving
water.
Carvings of victorious warriors
with lines of tribute bearers and
captives served different propa-
ganda purposes. Aimed at visiting
diplomats or citizens of occupied
nations, they were “calculated
to intimidate,” Dr. Potts
says. One clay tablet from
the 21st century B.C.
bears a menacing cunei-
form inscription: “I, the
king, have destroyed the
cities and ruined the city
walls, have terrified the ...
foreign lands like a flood ...
have crushed the popula-
tions as if with a pestle.”
More than a thousand
years later, in the 9th century
B.C., the Assyrian emperor Shal-
maneser III had his military cam-
paigns illustrated on a set of bronze
doors, parts of which are featured
in the show. And three centuries
after that, Nebuchadnezzar II,
known in the Bible as the wicked
king who destroyed Jerusalem, con-Clockwise from left: statue of Prince Gudea, ca. 2120 B.C.; wall painting of a
man’s head, ca. 850-650 B.C.; cylinder seal showing King Etana ascending to
heaven, ca. 2340-2150 B.C.; plaque of King Ur-Nanshe and his sons, ca. 2520
B.C.; statuette of the demon Pazuzu, ca. 7th century B.C.MUSÉE DU LOUVRE/RMN-GRAND PALAIS/ART RESOURCE, NY (5)orated with spirals and holding a
vase that emits two streams of wa-
ter, complete with swimming fish.
Gudea’s robe bears a lengthy in-
scription in Sumerian stating thatICONS
A new exhibition of Mesopotamian treasures and artifacts
sheds light on royal power and everyday life.From the Cradle
Of Civilization