10 things not to miss at Jamie Wyeth retrospective

• %22You talk to young people and their idea is that museums are filled with old dead people. Maybe they%27ll come see this because I%27m not dead.%22
• Jamie Wyeth painted Christmas cards for both Bushes%2C as well as for Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton.
• The most striking Andy Warhol piece might be the 1976 oil portrait that Wyeth did of Warhol for their exchange.

CHADDS FORD, PA. – A much larger crowd than usual jostles for space Tuesday afternoon at The Brandywine River Museum of Art's new show, "Jamie Wyeth," a look at a favorite son's six-decade career.

Winterwear helps viewers fence off the viewing spot they have claimed in front of portraits of presidents and dogs and oceans and Wyeth's wife, Phyllis. Purses become weapons that extend personal space as the art lovers try to absorb this native genius for just a moment longer.

The master himself sticks his head into one of the galleries, is immediately mobbed and retreats. He settles into a nearby corner office overlooking the river, writing out the notes he is about to inscribe in exhibit catalogs for both former Presidents George Bush.

"How do you spell endeavor?" he asks as he finishes writing what he wants to say on a scrap of paper. He carefully strikes out the word and writes the correct spelling beneath it.

Wyeth knows the Bushes, and he's signing the books at the request of a museum board member. And while Wyeth is signing, he's talking about how fascinated he is that George W. now spends a lot of his time painting, including a self portrait in the shower.

Wyeth painted Christmas cards for both Bushes, as well as for Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. And he shares a birthday with George W. – July 6, 1946. Barbara Bush once marveled that they were born within minutes of each other, like twins.

"Switched at birth," Jamie jokes.

No one was surprised Friday when 600 people showed up for the opening party for the retrospective. Three generations of Wyeth artists – Jamie's grandfather N.C. and his father Andrew – have lived in this area. They and their depictions of the landscape ennoble and define the area.

The exhibit is the first major retrospective of Jamie's work, although plenty of previous shows have focused on a narrow slice of his work, such as dogs, animals or farm life. It was organized and launched by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. After the show closes April 5, it will travel on to San Antonio, Texas, and then Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas.

While Wyeth's delighted the retrospective is rocking the Brandywine museum, he says he doesn't enjoy the shows. When he walks through, he says, "All the inadequacies jump out at me."

He's also really invested in what he's working on now, he says. These works are like children he's sent out into the world to make their way. They have their own lives, he says.

One thing the show does do, he says, is make him aware his work is "scattered" stylistically and thematically, "almost like a group show." Then he walks across the hall into the gallery of his father's work, which has a flow his does not, and it further emphasizes the difference.

"My work is all over the place," he says. "I don't know if that's a good thing."

But later, he says, he worries that he'll get frozen into a style or subject and not keep growing, and he knows his father worried about the same thing.

One aspect of having a retrospective that nags at him: "I feel kind of dead, like this is it."

On the other hand, he says, "You talk to young people and their idea is that museums are filled with old dead people. Maybe they'll come see this because I'm not dead."

And there's a lot to see. Here are 10 things not to miss:

The two mixed media dioramas built by Wyeth make Jamie the first of the three Wyeth men to venture into sculpture, says art conservator Joyce Hill Stoner of the University of Delaware and Winterthur Museum. Curator Elliot Bostwick Davis heard about the tableaux five years ago and kept asking to see them while she was working on the retrospective. Wyeth kept saying no. He built them so he could paint and draw from them, not to exhibit them.

But after three years, he said yes. Davis insisted the miniature versions of New York City's La Côte Basque restaurant, which shows Truman Capote and Joanne Carson eating there, and Andy Warhol's factory dining room, which shows Warhol and other Factory insiders, must be in the show.

The Wyeth family has a long history of interest in miniatures. Andrew Wyeth had a castle that was on display at the museum during the holidays, complete with toy soldiers. Jamie's aunt Ann Wyeth McCoy had a dollhouse she adored throughout her life that is often on display at the holidays. And when the museum did an exhibit of miniature portraits of eyes in 2010, they were from Jamie and Phyllis Wyeth's collection.

Jamie said he often sculpts the heads of people whose portrait he is painting as part of his creative process, but he destroys those sculptures immediately. He made the tableaux figures out of the bodies of G.I. Joe dolls whose heads he ripped off. The model heads are sculpted out of plasticine, which hardens over time, and he used hair from Barbie dolls. He's particularly pleased that Warhol looks so realistic.

Hidden in plain sight: The art on the wall in Warhol's dining room is a miniature oil painting that's a copy by Wyeth of the painting that really hung there.

11 depictions of Andy Warhol are in the exhibit. That's one-tenth of the works in the exhibit, and illustrates how important the relationship was to both, says Amanda Burdan, the Brandywine River Museum of Art curator who oversaw the show here.

Wyeth spent 1976 and 1977 at the Factory. He and Warhol created portraits of each other, and collected antiques together, included taxidermy animals, says Stoner. The works depicting Wyeth include sketches, paintings, a full-on portrait and the sculpted doll sitting in the tableaux vivant.

Wyeth still paints Warhol, and there are images done in 2012 and 2013 in the exhibit, including the ones inspired by a dream that Wyeth had after his father died.

The most striking Warhol piece might be the 1976 oil portrait that Wyeth did of Warhol for their exchange. It shows an intense Warhol looking directly at the viewer, holding his equally attentive dachshund. It's reminiscent of Wyeth's unflinching 1963 portrait of Helen Taussig, a Johns Hopkins cardiologist who helped cure blue baby syndrome, that's on the other side of the room, Burdan says.

The retrospective began with a suggestion from art dealer Warren Adelson that the Boston Museum consider an exhibit of Wyeth's portraits. But when Elliott Bostwick Davis began looking at the portraits and learning more about Wyeth, she wanted to do a full look at his career.

The show opens with a gallery of those portraits, including Wyeth's 1972 oil self-portrait of himself with a pumpkin covering his head, a 1969 oil portrait of his father, the 1963 oil "Portrait of Shorty," and 1965's "Draft Age," an oil painting that often hangs in the Brandywine, and a study for it.

In that study, Wyeth contemplates posing the model as a military pilot hero, but the final painting shows an anti-hero clad in impenetrable wraparound sunglasses and a zippery motorcycle jacket, sort of a hero for the times, says Burdan.

Hidden in plain sight: Davis pointed out to museum docents Monday that "Draft Age" is so detailed you can find the reflection of the figure of Jamie painting in the sunglasses and the rivets on the jacket, Burdan says.

Wyeth paints on it, and he paints it.

There's a 2007 acrylic, oil and watercolor portrait of Warhol with his dog Archie; a 1976 one in charcoal, gouache and watercolor; a 1998 watercolor and gouache of birds on ice in "Ice Storm – Maine;" and the 2006 frenetic watercolor, gouache and enamel "Inferno, Monhegan."

He says on the wall text with "Inferno" that he's fascinated by the texture and structure of cardboard and it makes him feel like he's in another world when he works on it.

But then he turns around and paints scenes that include cardboard boxes, such as 1981's "10 W 30" in watercolor and varnish that depicts chickens in a cardboard box, or 1985's "Cornflakes," another watercolor and varnish work, that shows a rooster strutting by a crumpled box. These are not on cardboard. They're painted on paper.

He's gotten looser and "juicier" as he's aged, Stoner says. That continues to make his work much more like his grandfather N.C. than his father Andrew's, she says.

"I don't think there's any question really," Wyeth says. "I think my work is closer to my grandfather's than my father's." He has painted with his father and said his father was actually a wild painter, who would then refine and refine the work.

Stoner points to many examples of what she calls "juicy," including 1975's "The Islander," a portrait of a ram looking out to sea. He squeezed the paint directly onto the canvas and then textured it with his brush handle.

The texture of another painting, 1968's "Portrait of Lady," a sheep with really thick wool, stunned Burdan when she saw it in person. She had seen it before in books and reproductions, "and it doesn't do it justice. It's just one of those things you have to see in the real version," Burdan says.

Both Stoner and Davis suggest visitors pay close attention to the ocean 2009's "Sea Watchers" and "The Sea, Watched," both oils on canvas, and 2011's "A Recurring Dream," which acrylic, oil and watercolor on cardboard. They are three versions of a dream that Wyeth had after his father died. The original included his father and grandfather on Maine cliffs overlooking the sea with Andy Warhol standing in the distance watching them. The extreme spatters of the water and white caps changes in all them, with different colors, swirls and textures, but all roiling and all beating against the rocks.

Wyeth says that he's painted that scene seven times. He keeps taking people out of the scene, until the last version had only one person, standing on the cliff. This process reminded him of something his father said about "Christina's World," the painting that's considered Andrew's masterpiece. It shows a woman who appears to be crawling up a hill to a rural home.

"He always said he felt 'Christina's World' would have been better without Christina in it," Wyeth says. But she made the painting, he's told.

"The title also makes it," Wyeth says. "That is my mother, who titled all of his work."

The frames Wyeth worked on, including those around the "Seven Deadly Sins," but particularly "Sea Star," a 1985 oil on gessoed panel, which Wyeth created a frame of shells around.

"It doesn't travel very often because of how fragile it is," Burdan says. "Look at it now because you may never see it travel again. It had to have a special vacuum seal case to protect the frame so it could travel with the least damage possible."

The painting belongs to the Terra Foundation of American Art, which closed its Chicago museum. The only way people can see its works is if they are loaned to other institutions and exhibits.

"This is a pretty high-level special," Burdan says.

Stoner also notes the borders around the gull paintings in "Seven Deadly Sins," which seem to float on a hellish background of red.

The pencil drawings from Wyeth's childhood. His mother, Betsy, saved about 1,100 of them and Davis picked six for the exhibit. She says visitors should look not just at the quality of the drawings, but at the themes in them.

They depict cowboys fighting, musketeers on horseback, D'Artagnan with his head thrown back so all you can see is the tip of his nose, boys sledding in snow, a lover scaling a castle wall and his Aunt Carolyn, with whom he studied art, accepting mail from a mailman who's peeking through the window because Aunt Carolyn doesn't have anything on under the apron she's wearing, which is clear from the rear.

It's Davis' opinion that whatever painters are painting (and maybe people at large are focusing on) at the age of 5 and 6 is what they'll end up doing in their life.

Wyeth's drawings depict his love of animals and nature, adventure and physical derring-do, and his already witty view of the world.

He likes them because of their innocence and wonder, which he says artists want to hang on to.

The 1967 oil on canvas "Portrait of John F. Kennedy."

Kennedy was a man whose face everyone knew. After Wyeth finished it, Jackie Kennedy liked it, but Robert Kennedy didn't. RFK said it reminded him too much of the way the president looked during the Cuban missile crisis.

Hidden in plain sight: "If you take the time to look, one of the intense details that's there that shows the level of detail is the presidential cufflink," Burdan says. "It was loaned by Jacquelyn Kennedy so he could use it specifically to get it accurately."

While the cufflink is quite visible at the bottom of the painting, many people don't notice it, she says.

The subject of 2001's Patriot's Barn, a white barn with a huge American flag on its side, is just down the road on Highway 52, Stoner says. Visitors can see the painting, and then go see the real thing.

TV Guide used the image on its cover right after 9/11, Stoner says. Wyeth spotted the barn and painted it in watercolor, gouache and pastel from the side of the road. He had hurt his foot and had it propped up on the dashboard while he was working.

Burdan particularly likes the painting because Wyeth doesn't paint a lot of the Brandywine Valley architecture, tending to focus more on the structures in Maine. He also uses a reflection of the barn in a pool of water to repeat the image of the flag, another technique that you don't see much in his work, but that Andrew Wyeth used in a painting of Keurner Farm called "Brown Swiss."

The night skies. Both Burdan and Stoner really like the 1993 oil "Meteor Shower," which shows a scarecrow in an 1912 military blue coat against a night sky.

The comet in the upper left was done with real mother of pearl and is translucent, Stoner says.

Burdan says Wyeth often painted the night sky and he always made sure that stars were there. They are very apparent in the series he did for NASA, which was designed to draw attention to to space programs.

Both Burdan and Stoner also point to 1969's "Moon Landing," an oil on canvas, which shows a full moon lighting up the ocean.

The idea of capturing the world while the moon landing was going on speaks directly to the Wyeth tradition of painting adventures.

"For his generation, we're not talking about pirates. We're not talking about knights. We're talking about explorers of a different sort," Burdan says. "I think the fascination with space and the sky and astronauts and exploration; it's all there in the subtext."

Contact Betsy Price at (302) 324-2884 or beprice@delawareonline.com.

IF YOU GO

WHAT: Jamie Wyeth: A retrospective featuring work form six decades

WHERE: Brandywine River Museum of Art, 1 Hoffman's Mill Road, Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania

WHEN: Through April 5

ADMISSION: $12 adults; $8 ages 65 and up; $6 students and ages 6-12. Free from 9:30 a.m. to noon on Sundays, and once you're in, you're in for the day.

FOR MORE INFORMATION: (610) 388-2700; www.brandywinemuseum.org

UPCOMING EVENTS

FEB. 1: PNC Arts Alive Family Program – Artful Animals. 10 a.m. to noon. Free admission until noon. Explore the animal kingdom in Wyeth's paintings and assemble sculptural art.

Feb. 4: The Art of Jamie Wyeth: "Loves and Obsessions" lecture by Elliot Bostwick Davis, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, curator who put the show together. 6 p.m. Reception to follow. $20; $15 members. She is the John Moors Babot Chair of the Art of the Americas.

Fridays and Saturdays, Feb. 6-March 14: The Art of Jamie Wyeth Tour. In conjunction with the show, visit two of the museum's National Historic Landmark sites connect to Jamie's life -- the studio of his grandfather, N.C. Wyeth, where Jamie studied with his Aunt Carolyn, and the studio of his father, Andrew Wyeth, which was also Jamie's first studio.

Feb. 25 and March 25: 2 p.m. "Jamie Wyeth" curator tour by Amanda C. Burdan, associate curator at the Brandywine River Museum of Art.