Wyeth–what a famous name! Jamie Wyeth is the third generation of painters in his family. We think of them as realists, but as you look at this exhibition of Jamie Wyeth, “Unsettled,” and compare him to his father Andrew (“Christina’s World”), and to his grandfather, N.C. Wyeth (“The Passing of Robin Hood”), we see an eerie, fantastic current in all three.

This exhibition however, foregrounds the supernatural. Two apparently straightforward works like “Bean Boots” or “Cat Bates of Monhegan” become spooky. Is the title meant to distract us as we look at “Bean Boots”? We gradually begin to see the details. First the man wearing bean boots is wearing a large glove for handling falcons, and a falcon looks at him fixedly from a cage. Above his head are numerous animal skulls sporting antlers. Along the left is an oversized pair of pants that seem to resolve into the base of a tree. In the right foreground a tree has two guns hanging off of it. Then there is the lighting which slashes a dark diagonal across the painting. A very strange painting. 

“Cat Bates of Monhegan” gives us a boy standing in contrapposto like a Greek statue, naked from the waist up, next to a fiery furnace with an open door. He looks defiant, as though he actually controls the unruly fire. He is actually burning garbage, apparently, but the open flames may be out of control at any minute.

Several of the paintings have a wild, unruly ocean as in “Spindrift,” with a surging sea coming toward the Wyeth house on a point, or, in “My Mother and the Squall,” the surging waters come almost up to the house as his mother hurries inside. Sometimes enlarged animals or birds overwhelm the scenery, changing it into a bizarre and ominous scene: in “Midsummer Night’s Dusk” the cows’ white faces look like skeletons; in “Hill Girt Farm,” giant pumpkins foreground a blazing fire.

And the birds! In “Wake,” a huge gull flies above a turbulent sea, straight at us (there is another version in which the gull flies over flames). We feel we will shortly be attacked. For anyone who has been dive-bombed by a bird, this painting is very disturbing. In “Snow Owl,” the bird looks at us fixedly: the offbeat subtitle is “Fourteenth in a Suite of Untoward Occurrences on Monhegan Island.” In this painting, as in all his paintings of the sea, the artist has plunged into its turbulence with masterly strokes of paint. 

Anther work in which the artist literally plumbed the depths is “Berg.” Apparently Wyeth actually did fall into the freezing sea, so this close-up view seems to recall that primal experience. Embedded in the iceberg are the imprints of birds as though they are frozen into the ice, but it melts away from the bottom (as icebergs do).  

There are many portraits: a suite of small Kennedy family portraits—clearly the result of close friendship—and two images of Andy Warhol, and Weyth’s grandfather. 

Warhol and Wyeth painted each others portraits in 1976. The exhibition includes two Warhol portraits, one “Andy Warhol in White (Andy Warhol Study),” painted the same year as the collaboration. The carefully studied face stands out from the white loosely painted background which merges with the white of Warhol’s face. In the second, which depicts Warhol standing behind a screen door, the most detailed part of the painting is Warhol’s head. Painted in 2015 it is an homage to a departed friend.

A portrait of Wyeth’s famous grandfather is also a part of the screen door series and an homage. Titled “Apples: Fifth in the Screen Door Series” we see an intimate look at his grandfather as he gathers apples. The background is filled with not-yet gathered apples. His grandfather’s face is lovingly painted. N.C. Wyeth died in 1945 when his car was hit by a train at a railroad crossing, a year before Jamie Wyeth was born.

One of the strangest “portraits” is “Julie on a Swing,” in which a diminutive Julie swings under a huge and threatening tree. She is oblivious to the threat. The strange yellow sky and ground suggest an imminent storm.

Finally, though, the most moving portrait is the homage to his wife, Phyllis Mills, “Spring: the Hanging of The Tree Rocks” (2017). It is clear that the artist wanted to jump into those trees himself. The tree rocks refer to the way that his wife suspended rocks from ropes on branches in order to reach the fruit she was gathering. Nymphs surround her in the trees. The entire frame is filled with growing vines. It speaks to love and life.

Susan Noyes Platt

Susan Noyes Platt writes for local, national, and international publications and her website, www.artandpoliticsnow.com.

“Jamie Wyeth: Unsettled” is on view Wednesday through Sunday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Thursday from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. through October 5 at Frye Art Museum, located at 704 Terry Avenue in Seattle, Washington. For more information, visit www.fryemuseum.org.