Andrew Wyeth – Wind from the Sea
- Alan Whittle
- Oct 6
- 5 min read
Andrew Wyeth’s most famous painting, Christina’s World, depicted his friend and neighbour Christina Olson crawling sideways all alone towards her farmhouse home, a place which feels far too distant for one crippled by disease and unable to walk. Her ‘world’ of the title is devastatingly circumscribed. It is a haunting and melancholy work whose power derives in part from the artist’s decision to show us only a rear view of his subject, a decision which dials down our pity (the artist once described Christina as a ’wounded gull’) but dials up the sense of Hitchcockian unheimlich-ness. Wind from the Sea by contrast is a view through a top floor window of that same eighteenth-century clapboarded Olson home but this time no human figures are shown, although critics have conjectured that Christina remains the subject or at least the inspiration for it. Wyeth described the genesis for the work, recalling how when he opened a long-closed up casement window on the upper floor one day, a gust of air blew into the room (he had to wait for it to happen apparently), billowing the sheer curtains. These are painted as embroidered with images of birds which seem to comment symbolically on Christina’s longing for flight, for a freedom of movement which is sadly only conceivable through its ersatz representation in the fabric. Those birds may give the illusion of moving with the breeze, but in reality, they remain permanently netted. The room was effectively out of bounds to Christina, whose disability prevented her from reaching the third floor, but her caged and damaged spirit is felt there in those enlaced birds, nonetheless.
The brother and sister Olsons lived in Cushing, near the coast of Maine where Wyeth also kept a summer home and where, as in his hometown of Chadds Ford in Pennsylvania, the history, the landscape and the people provided rich inspiration for an artist determined to eschew the lure of the avant-garde metropolitan art movements of the time – the abstract expressionism of de Kooning, Pollock and Rothko was approaching its apogee when World and Wind were painted. Wyeth chose instead to create almost hyper-real representational meditations on powerfully felt emotions through the close depiction of unassuming subjects and figures that seem to be at one with, and profoundly belonging to, their intensely American-rural locale.
Wyeth often painted windows and doors, and it is their liminal quality that so forebodingly entices the viewer too. In Wind from the Sea, we are inside a dingy and poorly lit room looking out, conscious of a just now stifling interior space but relieved by the air blowing in. At first sight we might imagine the sea salty edge to this gust, it’s refreshing antidote to mustiness; but we seem to occupy both domains simultaneously, drawn to the expansiveness and relative brightness of outside, and also secure or at least defended from it inside. The wafted curtains somehow negotiate the boundary between these jurisdictions, as if translating a language or mediating the different moods of disparate spaces, their transparency suggestive of an idea about our ability to see and understand clearly – do we always look at or through what is in front of us? Which way of looking yields more understanding? The work was made just a couple of years after the shocking death of Wyeth’s domineering father who was killed when his car was hit on a railway crossing, and the fearful sense of the transition between life and death may also inform this work. A twin-tracked roadway leads away from (and towards of course) the house, curving into the distance towards the water, while a silhouetted treeline feels brooding, ominous. The peopleless vistas conjure loneliness and entrapment as we hover on the threshold between what is outward and inward, between nature’s animation and death’s oblivion.
The laciness of the curtain is painted with meticulous detail. Its left-hand end is shown with a tattered edge as it floats decayingly on the breeze in front of the cracked plaster of the wall on the left. These images of degradation speak of a certain neglect, of Miss Faversham-like ruin. We are looking out from within a seldom used or disregarded room, but which nevertheless affords us the same visual access to an outside view as any other room in the house. But this one seems to stand for something psychically dark. It has a similar sense of alienation as evoked by an Edward Hopper painting. The blackness of the drawn blind at the top of the work admits little light through, its age and wear forestalling its complete blackout capacity, but it is a blackness which finds a portentous echo in the trees on the horizon.
In our everyday conversations we will often refer to a ‘breath of wind’ as if personifying the natural phenomenon. This meteorological anthropomorphism goes back a long way. In ancient Greece, Zephyrus or Zephyr was the god of the wind and was associated with life-giving and even procreation. In Botticelli’s early Renaissance iconic masterpiece Primavera, it brings fertility to the springtime world. Wind from the Sea does make one feel as if someone or something, a spirit, has tried to breathe some life into a lifeless space but whose gothic decay and shuttered inwardness will determinedly resist revivification.
A further significant point of comparison between the World and Wind paintings is their respective viewpoints. In the former, we are positioned low down behind Christina and our eye is drawn like hers up towards the out-of-reach house on the hill which seems to add to its powerful sense of forlorn and wistful longing. At the same time, the feeling of powerlessness it conjures is akin to those we might experience in an unresolved nightmare. But in Wind we are looking down like observers hidden from view and as if snooping voyeuristically on any unsuspecting passerby. More sinisterly still, it’s a sniper’s eye view. There is something unsettling about this – the viewer is almost obliged to inhabit a quasi-sociopathic stance, watching out anti-socially for who might approach along that road. The right-hand side of the window is cropped so again this fosters the uneasy apprehension that not everything outside is in plain view, that something or someone may be hidden from us in this less than panoramic prospect.
At another metaphorical or dream-interpretive level, if a house often represents the body, then an open window must be like a gaping mouth and here perhaps a sharp inward agonal breath sucks in the fabric of the curtains and one can imagine them to cause choking and suffocation. So, in this reading, far from the wind having restorative properties, it becomes another harbinger of death, a surrogate for that last shocked gasp, a final reflex inhalation before annihilation. This might seem overly bleak and certainly the painting will yield multiple interpretations not all of which need necessarily harp on the nihilistic, but for me it remains the case that the work is oddly perturbing for such a simple and straightforward subject. But the finely detailed way that those curtains are painted, with its tempera particularised brushwork is as if a vision has come sharply into focus through a lens, one which focuses not just on the gossamer intricacy of stuff but also on the shroud-suggestive certainty of lonely mortality.
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