Painters of man and nature

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Zoran Music: 'A Landscape with Rocks' example of the total interpene- crippled by polio and could tration of art and experience in move only by hauling herself extremely different way,. that World". , therefore, as with so If they did not both have exhibitions of their paintings in London at the same time, there would be little reason to compare Andrew Wyeth and Zoran Music.

That is, apart perhaps from the fact that they are of a similar age (Wyeth was born in 1917, Music in 1919) and neither of them can be placed in any recognised "school" of contemporary paintings.

Both men have created paintings of an extremely individual kind. And their paintings express and reflect their very different lives.

Ancestry Andrew Wyeth has lived all his life in two places-Chadds Ford in Pennsylvania and Cushing, Maine on the coast of New England.

Though clearly proud of his German and Swiss ancestry, he has scarcely travelled.

Zoran Music has seldom stayed still. Born in Gorizia in Northern Italy, he has constantly travelled throughout Europe, except when forcibly prevented from doing so between 1943 and 1945 when he was imprisoned as an anti-fascist in the Dachau concentration camp.

In the thirties he was in Spain until the outbreak of the civil war when he went to Yugoslavia and then to Venice, where he was arrested by the Nazis and where he still spends much of his time.

It was in the Venice Biennale of 1956 that Music first won the Grand Prix which brought him to international fame in Europe, if not so much in Britain.

At this time no-one, not even the painter himselt, knew of the effect which his two years in Dachau had had on Music's mind and art.

In Dachau he had secretly made 200 drawings of the horrors he saw around him.

Only 35 of these still exist, mostly in the painter's possession.

After his release he resumed his career, painting especially dry, rocky landscapes in Umbria (Italy) and in Dalmatia (Yugoslavia). Some of the results can be seen in the present exhibition.

Evocative

They are strong and evocative paintings but by themselves present only a limited aspect of the art and mind of Music.

In the mid-1960s he sudden ly found himself unable to continue painting such pictures-a condition of artistic paralysis which lasted five years.

It was suddenly broken in 1969 when, tormented by the memories of Dachau, Music began to paint a series of terrifying images of mass death. "I was s extremely. unwell and unhappy" he has said, "and the corpses started to come out"

• None of these horrifying and intensely moving paintings and drawings are on show in the present exhibition (though the gallery has a few and will show them to interested visitors).

The gallery intends to hold a further exhibition in the future devoted to the Dachau paintings and drawings.

But the rest of his output cannot really be appreciated without relating it to the Dachau paintings.

This is true personally since Music's new surge of creative activity in 1969 and 1970 also enabled him to resume and develop his landscape painting.

Tragic beauty But it is equally true artistically. He himself describes the Dachau paintings as expressing "the tragic beauty of whole landscapes of corpses" • They taught him, he has said, "to strip everything down to the essential".

This illuminates his more recent paintings of which a major example is on view in this exhibition-a long series of watercolours entitled "Landscape with rocks"

Superficially similar, they are in fact constant variations of colour, light and arrangement.

•Together they have an obsessive quality-like the Dachau paintings.

And on a closer look their structure too is similar. The rocks and the skulls seem almost interchangeable.

When in 1960 Music describes his native area of the Karst he already seemed to prefigure the connection with the terrors of Dachau which have later become so much more obvious in his painting:

"Imagine a great plain of stones relieved only by little round hillocks ... a poor area, dry and monotonous, without trees ... it almost never rains and the whole plateau is habitually racked by the bora, a horrible wind as ferocious as the Mistral ... the place has become such an obsession with me that I no longer know whether I'm describing the landscape or my paintings of it."

Obsession

It is clear that he could today &say something similar of Dachau. It is this combined obsession which makes both parts of Music's work, and the interconnections between them, so powerful.* And this gives fascinating a great painter.

Though it appears in an same interpenetration is also a central feature of the work of Andrew Wyeth.

Wyeth is also above all landscape painter-but not painter of landscapes.

That is to say, he is a painter of his own rural surroundings in Chadd's Ford and Maine-but not as "scenery" but as the environment in which people live.

And the people concerned are particular ones, largely Wyeth's neighbours-the Kuerner family in Chadds Ford and the Olsens in Maine.

They them sieves, their tvnical eastern seahoard old wooden-built houses, and Wyeth's own house and their surroundings are the subjects of most of Wyeth's paintings.

It may seem, as a result, that Wyeth's work is very parochial. In fact, however, it is much more universal than the subject matter would suggest.

Interrelation

Wyeth's theme is not so much the trees or grass or faces or wooden houses or animals which he paints with such painstaking care and figurative detail.

His real theme is the universal one of the interrelation between man and nature. His landscapes, even when, typically, there are no human figures in them, invariably carry the evidence of humanitysometimes in the form of buildings, at times semi-ruined ones being clawed back by nature; sometimes in the form of a story of which the painting is an episode.

Probably his best-known painting called "Christina's World"-unfortunately not in the present exhibition-shows a woman (Christina Olsen, Wyeth's neighbour in Maine) half-sitting, half-lying on a grassy hill, propping herself up on an apparently deformed arm, and gazing towards the brow of the hill, over which her house can be seen.

Christina Olsen along the ground with her arms.

The story of "Christina's many other wyeth paintings, Is the story of a whole life.

To Wyeth, Christina Olsen represented an ideal of patient, self-sacrificing struggle.

It is a constant theme of his paintings and one which has been taken up in a reactionary way within the USA as representing some sort of "American ideal" of individualism and sacrifice.

The fact that his paintings can be used in this way is one reason why Wyeth has become such a popular, establishment artist in his own country.

But Wyeth is not a reactionary painter. An inaiviquanst ne certainly is, but his theme of struggle against nature or adversity can also have a progressive content.

For instance, in 1971 the striking workers of the Museum of Modern Art in New York used "Christina's World" in their propaganda as the symbol of their own struggle.

In their posters a balloon came out of Christina's mouth saying simply "Strike!"

In another respect Wyeth is sometimes accused of being reactionary because he is also fashionable among those who see his paintings as symbolising a "back to nature" perspective.

But this also represents a compiete misunderstanding of Wyeth's view of nature.

His landscapes and interiors are not cosy or idealised. They are sombre, mysterious, often menacing as the titles of some of the pictures in the exhibition show - Witching Hour" "Distant Thunder".

Nature to him is both beautiful and awesome.

Wyeth is also criticised as reactionary because of his detailed, figurative "old-fashioned" style.

It is an absurdly formalistic allegation.

Figurative, representational painting is not a single style. In different forms it has appeared just like different forms of abstract art, at various points in the history of painting.

Though he recognises the influence of Durer and the 19th Century leading German painter Caspar David Friedrich, Wyeth's style is copied from no-one.

It iS. an individual style developed in order to express the particular combination of "beauty, power and emotiona. content" which in his own words he wants to be the content of his paintings.

I find many of the paintings in this fine exhibition have enormous beauty, power and emotional content. This is true, not only of seascapes which create for the viewer the illusion of feeling the wind and tasting the salt but it is also true of the portraits.

One of his best portraits is that of his Chadd's Ford neighbour Karl Kuerner wearing the helmet which he wore when fighting in the German army in the First World War.

It combines Wyeth's unsentimental friendship with Kuerner and also (another curious parallel with Music) his haunting by the horrors of the First World War, which he himself experienced.

In the excellent television film on Wyeth which was shown on the South Bank Show on June 8, Wyeth revealed the influence on him of King Vidor's 1925 film "The Big Parade" which shows the degradation and horror of trench warfare from the point of view of an "ordinary American soldier"

Wyeth has not expressed this influence openly but hints at it through allusive references to the evidence of militarism in the Kuerner household.

The same helmet that Karl wears in his portrait, which makes him look in Wyeth's words "severe, more like a U boat captain than a farmer" also appears in another painting "Pine Baron" as a receptacle in which Kuerner's wife collects pine cones.

This is typical of the subtle way in which Wyeth portrays the interaction of man and nature-small everyday- things often bearing echoes of great but distant historical events.

Another, almost obsessive, feature of this interaction is Wyeth's use of windows which appear in virtually all his paintings.

Windows mediate for him between the interior man-made world and the exterior natural world.

His landscapes are often seen through windows from houses, his interiors sometimes seen from outside.

Windows in one direction admit light and wind-and in the other longing for or fear of what lies outside.

Wyeth has become famous and fashionable in the USA, frequently for the wrong reasons.

The excellent exhibition at the Royal Academy is the first opportunity to see a large selection of his paintings in this country where up to now they have been little known.

Both this and the Zoran Music exhibition offer good opportunities both to see many fine paintings and to gain an exciting insight into the creative and emotional life of two great contemporary painters.

Andrew Wyeth: 'The German' (1975)