cover image Andrew Wyeth: A Secret Life

Andrew Wyeth: A Secret Life

Richard Meryman. HarperCollins, $35 (464pp) ISBN 978-0-06-017113-1

""They're sticking pins in me!"" Wyeth complained in 1986 after the press roasted his furtive and seminude ""Helga"" paintings. ""I'm a has-been."" Then 70, he had been an artistic icon since his 20s, and Christina's World, Wyeth's signature canvas, ranked with Whistler's portrait of his mother and Wood's American Gothic as national images. Meryman (Mank: The Wit, World, and Life of Herman Mankiewicz) bases his biography on interviews over many years with Wyeth, his family and his inner circle. Bare of printed sources and dependent on dialogue, the book strikingly evokes three generations of a talented, idiosyncratic family, its middle generation the progeny of a larger-than-life artist (N.C. Wyeth) insecure to the end about his worth. Andrew Wyeth (b. 1917) himself appears as a bundle of contradictions--modest and vain, outgoing and secretive, moved by anger as well as by love, a painter of pitiless pictures as well as postcard scenes. To his biographer, Wyeth's studies of rustic loneliness and decay accomplish what Edward Hopper achieved for 20th-century urban life. There are 75 b&w and 16 color photos here. Wyeth wanted a ""tough book,"" writes Meryman, not one in which his works were ""reverentially placed on the page surrounded by white borders""; he wanted ""the excitement of pictures bled off the edges and carried across the gutter."" The artist should be pleased with the result. Readers certainly will be. (Nov.)