Art: NC Wyeth.
N.C. Wyeth’s “Apotheosis of the Family,” which hung behind the tellers in the downtown Wilmington Savings Fund Society for three quarters of a century, has been readied for public viewing at the artist’s grandson’s home in Wilmington, Delaware.
I have always loved the monumental paintings of NC Wyeth. Today we learn about his largest mural, which was created during the Depression and is getting a new lease on life.
Ralph Blumenthal writes at the New York Times, “As the Great Depression savaged America, a bank in Wilmington, Del., commissioned the protean illustrator N.C. Wyeth to soothe anxious customers with an epic tribute to the bounteous land and its laboring families.
“Known more by his initials than his given name, Newell Convers, he had long been a towering figure in American art, embellishing classics like Treasure Island. … Wyeth’s mural, in oil in five panels, came in at 60 feet long and 19 feet high — his biggest and one of the largest ever created for a public space in the United States. For three quarters of a century, it hung behind the tellers in the downtown Wilmington Savings Fund Society, inspiring visions of thrift and industry. And then it came down and disappeared.
“Now it has re-emerged in a gleaming new round barn on N.C.’s grandson Jamie Wyeth’s Point Lookout Farm outside Wilmington and near the Wyeth studios in Chadds Ford, Pa. …
“The 1932 work, ‘Apotheosis of the Family,” aims to welcome visitors by jitney from the nearby Brandywine Museum of Art [soon].
“N.C. Wyeth is enjoying a renaissance of sorts. His work will be included in the filmmaker George Lucas’s new Museum of Narrative Art, scheduled to open next year in Los Angeles. Five years ago, Wyeth had a retrospective at the Taft Museum of Art in Cincinnati, an exhibition that cited his influence on cinema. …
“In ‘Apotheosis,’ which celebrates the pinnacle of family, Wyeth … looms bare-chested dead center as a kind of superman, beside his wife, Carol, amid vignettes of harvesting, fishing, weaving and timbering as the seasons change. Pan plays the pipes, smoke boils from a campfire, and ships with billowing sails race for a distant shore. The foreground sprouts strange flowers hardly seen in nature.
“Prominent among other family models is Wyeth’s flaxen-haired son, Andrew, then 15 — destined to eclipse the rest of the famous art clan with his starkly realistic landscapes and portraits — drawing a bow and arrow and nude but for a modest blurry G-string. Next to him stands his sister Carolyn as a toddler, although she was actually eight years older. …
‘The work enshrines two of N.C.’s core beliefs — ‘love of family and the importance of land’ — at a terrible time when such values were especially precious. …
“After periodic restorations, most recently in 1998, the painting was pried off the wall and damagingly rolled up 10 years later when the bank was sold for conversion into apartments.
“The mural went to the Delaware Historical Society, which couldn’t place it. It was then bequeathed to the Wyeth Foundation for conservation, with Jamie, now 79, committing about $1 million for its reinstallation in a new round barn on his 250-acre Brandywine farm.
“Jamie is the widower of Phyllis Mills Wyeth, a philanthropist and socialite racehorse breeder. … As a tribute to his wife after her death at 78 in 2019, Jamie opened the pastures as a lifetime sanctuary for former racehorses. It also became a refuge for the nearly-century-old artwork. …
“ ‘I adore my grandfather’s work,’ he said. ‘He had more influence on me than my father.’ …
“Jamie, who was born the year after N.C. was killed in a bizarre train collision in 1945, recalled visits to his grandfather’s painting studio crammed with old muskets and cutlasses for his illustrations. …
“The story of the mural’s resurrection has many beginnings, but let’s start with the Wyeth patriarch: N.C., a descendant of early English colonists and maternal grandparents from Switzerland, who settled in Needham, Mass., where he was born in 1882. His father wanted him to go into farming but he was strongly drawn to art, winning acceptance as a star protégé of the pre-eminent illustrator Howard Pyle.”
Lots more at the Times, here. You will love how the Times animated restoration visuals by Caroline Gutman.
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