Reviewed in NOBS Newsletter

Vol. XXI No. 3, Summer 2004
by Rhonda Rinehart

Does Gene Logsdon love Andrew Wyeth or the myth of Andrew Wyeth? Perhaps the answer is not particularly important in the 21st century with the larger concerns of war, unemployment and depletion of the ozone layer. But when Logsdon first wrote Wyeth People twenty years earlier, America was facing many of the same problems and difficulties it faces now America was still licking its wounds from Vietnam, fearful of another Three Mile Island, watching gas prices rise. The answer to the question was no more important than it is now, and yet it is not that easy to dismiss.

Though Logsdon's narrative of his search for the elusive artist, Andrew Wyeth, he recaptures the Americana that remains only in the memories of old ladies and wrinkled men—simplicity, hard work, earthiness, uncertain beauty. He shows us what we are rapidly losing and what many of us will experience only between the covers of awkwardly sized picture books. It is important to Logsdon that we do not lose that symbiotic relationship with the land, or with each other. That we do not ignore the beauty in a weathered barn door, or the way light falls on an imperfect face.

This book reveals as much about Gene Logsdon as it does about Andrew Wyeth. It is as much a narrative about the author's desires, values and motivations as it is about the reasons behind Wyeth's elusiveness and his attitudes toward his work. Logsdon seems equally driven to write about Wyeth by both a sense of awe and respect for the artist, and the driving need to be artistic in his own right. He desires to write what no one else has written about Wyeth. From the deep pool of hundreds of journalists and authors and critics who have written about Andrew Wyeth, Gene Logsdon needed to be different.

Did he succeed? You bet. "Everything had been said about Wyeth, but in a way very little had been said," Logsdon muses. "What could I do about it?" The answer to this question led the author to attack the problem of catching the evasive Wyeth through his own evasive means. He simply decided to "talk" to Wyeth by talking to the people who knew Wyeth best—the people he had painted. This roundabout tactic leads the reader on a journey through Logsdon's beloved and idealized Americana while leaving Wyeth alone with his hoped-for anonymity.

NOBS Newsletter
North. Ohio Bibliphilic Soc.
Summer 2004