Window-themed Andrew Wyeth exhibition reveals much to admire, little to love

Visitors to Washington's National Gallery of Art's "Andrew Wyeth: Looking Out, Looking In" are greeted by a masterpiece, the artist's 1947 Wind from the Sea, which structures the whole exhibition. The theme is windows, their recurrence as icon in the painter's oeuvre, their personal and sometimes hermetic meanings as metaphor, and the larger tension they set up between representation and abstraction in the some 60 paintings, watercolours and drawings on view.

Critics have been hating on Wyeth, who died in 2009, for at least a half-century and much of the venom was fuelled by art-world ideology. Wyeth committed at least two unpardonable sins, hewing to a realist style during an age of abstraction and irony, and achieving extraordinary popular success. One detractor dubbed him "our greatest living 'kitsch-meister'."

Wind from the Sea makes it impossible to accept those reflexive judgments, but taken together with the other works in this show, it doesn't make it much easier to love Wyeth's body of work.

Admire? Absolutely. But the art remains emotionally and often visually monochromatic, even monomaniacal. Wyeth gives us window after window - meticulous and virtuoso renderings - and yet the exhibition feels claustrophobic.

Wind from the Sea was painted in the ramshackle, 18th-century house of Christina and Alvaro Olson, siblings and friends of Wyeth's who lived on the coast of Maine. Wyeth was in a third-floor room, looking out to the sea, when the wind rustled the tattered curtain. Crocheted birds on the lacy fabric were caught momentarily in flight, and the painting is uncanny in its evocation of a numinous, fleeting instant of motion. Wyeth made a quick sketch, on the sheet of paper on which he had been drawing Christina Olson.

Olson, who was disabled by polio, was a friend of Wyeth's wife. She is mentioned in the title of Wyeth's most celebrated work, Christina's World, which depicts a thin woman lying on parched grass, looking up a low rise to an old farmhouse. Wyeth admired her strength and she became a frequent subject, or inspiration of his work.