THE WYETHS
A full size reproduction of Christina’s World painted by Andrew Wyeth hung in my parents’ home in Ithaca for years. I am guessing that it was bought at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, which owns the painting. My mother grew up in Buffalo, Illinois a farming village in Sangamon County where her father owned a firm which he lost when he made a bad investment in the stock market bubble of 1929. From then on he farmed his farm for someone else and resented it. Our family used to visit Hall Hill, as they called their farm on a small knoll in flat Illinois in summer vacations during the Second World War.
So my mother was a country girl with a huge small town extended family on her mother’s side with very narrow, stunted views of about Jews, Catholics and Blacks and the world beyond Sangamon County. She met my father when he was a student at the University of Illinois. He went off to India to be an agricultural missionary but returned to marry my mother in 1936. She returned to India with him, making a trip through Europe just before the second world war which opened her up to the world in every way. One of the things that excited her were museums and in particular, French Impressionism which led her in later years to become a member of the Museum of Modern Art and to regularly visit exhibits there.
So when an exhibition came this spring of the Wyeth family, NC Wyeth and children Andrew, Henriette and grandchild Jamie, it was both a big event for Asheville, but I went in honor of my mother, who died 12 years ago here near Asheville and who would certainly have visited the exhibit with us it had come twenty years earlier.
Museums let you photograph now as long you don’t use flash and somehow cellphone cameras, such as my iPhone, seem harmless. In the old days museums were very possessive of their art work and would allow no photographs. But now days with everyone a photographer and a new openness by museums to share their works in a digital world where sharing is ubiquitous, it is all right. I bring the paintings home and can look at the exhibit on my excellent screens any time I want which is much more comfortable and just as stimulating as standing for hours in a museum.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 