More On Wyeth and Vidor
Lloyd Fonvielle
a meeting between Wyeth and Vidor, was made by Vidor himself in 1980 and
was his last film. It was never released in Vidor's lifetime -- he died
just two years later -- and it seems to be unavailable at present. In
it, Wyeth remarks that when friends said they didn't understand why he
kept on watching "The Big Parade" after seeing it 180 times -- literally
-- he replied, "You don't understand my paintings, either."
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Nowhere Confidential:
Eric Stott
"Lloyd Fonvielle" <ll...@fabulousnoSPAMwhere.com> wrote in message
news:Mx81h.4689$tH2....@newsfe20.lga...
> "METAPHOR: KING VIDOR MEETS WITH ANDREW WYETH", the documentary short on a
> meeting between Wyeth and Vidor, was made by Vidor himself in 1980 and was
> his last film. It was never released in Vidor's lifetime -- he died just
> two years later -- and it seems to be unavailable at present. In it,
> Wyeth remarks that when friends said they didn't understand why he kept on
> watching "The Big Parade" after seeing it 180 times -- literally -- he
> replied, "You don't understand my paintings, either."
Well, I admire Wyeth, but I've never really thought of him as the great
american painter. I think he's a fine draftsman, but I can hardly find a
scrap of life in any of them. I think that he appealed to a conservative
less-is-more aesthetic; people who wanted to be spare and modern but didn't
want modernistic furniture and abstract art: shaker furniture and Wyeth
paintings made an acceptable substitute. Now his FATHER, Ahhhh, there was
a real artist.
Stott
Lloyd Fonvielle
> Well, I admire Wyeth, but I've never really thought of him as the great
> american painter. I think he's a fine draftsman, but I can hardly find a
> scrap of life in any of them. I think that he appealed to a conservative
> less-is-more aesthetic; people who wanted to be spare and modern but didn't
> want modernistic furniture and abstract art: shaker furniture and Wyeth
> paintings made an acceptable substitute. Now his FATHER, Ahhhh, there was
> a real artist.
I agree with you on that last point. The younger Wyeth is interesting
because he managed to somehow keep the formal concerns of 19th-Century
academic painting alive in the 20th Century and have them taken
seriously by serious art critics. To do this he had to remove a lot of
the punch and fun and sentiment from the 19th-Century form, or at least
to bury them deeper in more ambiguous images.
Someone once said that Andrew Wyeth is not as good as his admirers think
he is or as bad as his detractors think he is -- and I think that's a
fair assessment. When the intellectual stigma is finally removed from
Victorian styles and forms in critical circles, Andrew Wyeth will become
more significant as a historical figure in an under-appreciated
tradition and his father's reputation will rise dramatically, probably
eclipsing that of his son. Andrew Wyeth himself believes that the
latter will indeed happen someday.
Someday, too, the profound relationship between 19th-Century academic
painting and movies will be better appreciated -- a relationship that is
exemplified in Andrew Wyeth's obsession with "The Big Parade", for
reasons even he probably could not entirely grasp on a conscious level.
Eric Stott
posters? I know he did commercial work, even Coca-Cola advertisements.
Stott
"Lloyd Fonvielle" <ll...@fabulousnoSPAMwhere.com> wrote in message
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madevaraven
A FATHER AND HIS FAMILY that I recommend. It has loads of home movie
footage shot by N.C and the family over the years.
Joe Moore
"Lloyd Fonvielle" <ll...@fabulousnoSPAMwhere.com> wrote in message
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Randy Beucus
I saw King Vidor at a screening of The Big Parade at the PFA in
Berkeley in "75 or '76 I believe and he spoke of working on something
like this.
Randy