Spring Fed

Andrew Wyeth's art has proven to be one of the most unique and enduring American styles of the 20^th Century, garnering the artist longstanding international acclaim. With an original blend of simplicity and intricate detail, Wyeth elevates the everyday into timeless visions of poignant beauty. His work is appreciated for its exquisite attention to both subject and technique, for its celebration of American life, and for the haunting, elegiac silence that pervades his masterworks, including Spring Fed.

In the present work, a traditional rural American subject—a view of the Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, landscape from inside his neighbour Karl Kuerner’s barn—is elevated to 20^th Century masterpiece through Wyeth's modern focus on compositional design. Nancy Anderson writes of Spring Fed, “studies document the process by which Wyeth pared the view to its essentials, eliminating even the mullions from the lower window on the right. A tracing of the compositional elements reveals the painting’s geometric structure and reflects Wyeth’s claim that a painting should be both realistic and abstract. The mathematically precise painting is a study in looking – through multiple interiors, through multiple windows, through light and shade.” (Looking Out, Looking In, Washington, 2014, p. 29)

Indeed, Spring Fed is among the most poignant instances of Wyeth’s signature career-long motif—the use of multiple picture planes, divided and separated by windows and doors—featured in many of his most celebrated works, including Wind from the Sea (1947, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.). Wyeth’s windows, both open and closed, explore concepts of physical and emotional distance. As Anne Knutson writes, “Wyeth associates the liminal spaces of thresholds with psychological states of thinking, imagining, and dreaming; the paintings become magical chambers where dreams are played out.” (Andrew Wyeth: Memory & Magic, Atlanta, 2005, p. 75)

In Spring Fed, Wyeth employs the window threshold in multiple compositional and symbolic ways. Most directly, the window panes create a picture within a picture: the meticulously executed background, featuring cows against a glowing, almost otherworldly, backdrop of a grassy snow-covered hill. The image outside is of changing seasons, birth, life and organic form, which is sharply contrasted by the spare, geometric lines of the foreground interior. The importance of the view outside to the overall composition is underscored by the work’s title—Spring Fed—which confirms that source of the water in the interior trough is actually from the distant spring outdoors. Indeed, Wyeth himself described this deeply rooted connection between interior and exterior, writing about the present work, “In the barn was the trough–the water starting on the hill, the snow seeping into the ground, running down pipes through the house and into the trough, like life itself endlessly moving…There was a swirl of light on the steel milk bucket against the snow of the hill. Through the window, a sense of foreboding. I painted this in Spring Fed.” (as quoted in Looking Out, Looking In, Washington, 2014, p. 29)

This sense of foreboding partially lies in the depicted location’s link to the death of his father, the famed illustrator N.C. Wyeth, as the railroad tracks on which N.C.’s car stalled and he was killed are just over the hill rendered outside the windows of Spring Fed. This moment was an monumental one in the then-young artist’s life, undoubtedly influencing his career-long interest in life, death and rebirth. That hill on Kuerner Farm had particular significance to Wyeth and reappeared several times throughout his oeuvre, most notably in the earlier masterpiece Winter (1946, North Carolina Museum of Art).

Wyeth also linked Spring Fed with another tale of tragedy, the fable of Robin Hood—a notorious character also connected to his father N.C., who famously illustrated the story. While he was long past playing make-believe Robin Hood as a kid in the woods nearby, the story maintained strong personal connections for the younger Wyeth, inextricably linked to his own family history. Wyeth explained of Spring Fed, “It was really how I imagined the death of Robin Hood. He has been taken to a nunnery and locked in a room and bled for a day and half…inside Robin Hood in a pure white room on a stone slab, the blood from his veins running down the side of the slab and his helmet by his head.” (as quoted in Looking Out, Looking In, Washington, 2014, p. 29) With this association, the windows in Spring Fed become less of a liminal space for dreaming than a nightmare—where the peek into a world of light and plenty underscores the beauty of life that is no longer accessible.

Wyeth’s sister, Carolyn, has suggested a more universal interpretation of these undertones in Spring Fed. “It’s absolute finality,” she explained. “That’s it. That trough is like a casket. Those shadows are warm, and yet they’re cold, a cold cement look. It’s unrelenting. He just lets you look a little at the beautiful landscape. Don’t be too contented. That damn pail up there is like a helmet, the way it shines. There’s the Germanic–you know, Karl Kuerner making everything utilitarian–and that’s the way a casket is to me, utilitarian.” (Andrew Wyeth's Ides of March: The Making of a Masterpiece, Chadds Ford, 2013)

As observed by Carolyn, objects in Wyeth’s best paintings transform into personas, often serving as memento mori with links to specific individuals who have passed. Not just windows or doorways, but also mantels, lintels and walls, carry symbolism relating back to current or past inhabitants. The Kuerner Farm, along with the Olson Farm in Maine, is a central site of inspiration in Wyeth’s career that is part of the autobiographical underpinning of Wyeth’s body of work. As Wyeth once explained of Kuerner’s, “I didn't go to that farm because it was in any way bucolic. Actually I'm not terribly interested in farming. The abstract, almost military quality of that farm originally appealed to me and still does...To see the hills capped with snow in the wintertime or to look at the tawniness of the fields in the fall all made me want to paint it…I didn't think it was a picturesque place. It just excited me, purely abstractly and purely emotionally." (as quoted in Two Worlds of Andrew Wyeth: Kuerners and Olsons, exhibition catalogue, New York, 1976, p. 40)

With these many interconnecting layers of meaning, Spring Fed is “one of the most striking examples of this complex relationship between the exterior world Wyeth observed and the interior world he conjured.” (Looking Out, Looking In, exhibition catalogue, Washington, 2014). Indeed, even with the artist’s own musings about the painting, Spring Fed maintains an overall sense of mystery and tension that makes the work ever thought-provoking. Wanda Corn explains, “ [Wyeth] rarely lets us glimpse the multitude of private associations any single painting holds for him, letting them simply suffuse a picture with a general flavour. Like Picasso, he has created a veritable private iconography, hard to penetrate and impossibly fully to comprehend. We sense that Spring Fed, a typical barnyard scene, is haunted by stillness, bleached colors, and an atmospheric vacuum, but we will never know the far more complex associations and memories at play in the artist’s mind.” (Andrew Wyeth's Ides of March: The Making of a Masterpiece, Chadds Ford, 2013)

Imbued with these personal emotions that are quintessential to his best work, Spring Fed is also emblematic of the modern techniques of design and application Wyeth employed to create visual imagery that is intensely captivating even without background knowledge. In the scope of Wyeth’s career, the painting is a tour de force, at once both easy to understand, and also ceaselessly fascinating and attention holding, as Wyeth provokes the viewer to contemplate the mysteries of the human condition, found hidden within his distinct vision of American life.