More on the Tension Between Art and Political Correctness

The New York Times rehashed the career of American painter Andrew Wyeth on Feb. 3, 2022, using the transfer of a couple of small islands off the coast of Maine from Wyeth family foundations to Colby College as an excuse. 

 One paragraph in particular jumped out at me.

 "In a 2017 assessment of his paintings of Black people in the Brandywine Valley, the art historian Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw questioned the power imbalance in his representation of race, and also pointed out that in a handful of paintings he had darkened the skin tone of his white model, Helga Testorf, a Chadds Ford neighbor who posed for him in secret for more than a decade." 

 “His nude images of black women embody the power imbalance that characterized interracial interactions in the Brandywine Valley throughout the 20th century,” Shaw wrote in 2017, arguing that the “subordinate positions (of his models) as poor, black and working class enabled the artist to exert a great deal of control over how he imaged them on paper or canvas.” 

 To Ms. Shaw, the New York Times said, the visual representation of race in Wyeth’s work raised the question of how much leeway white artists should have in depicting subjects of another race. Is all fair in the name of art?

 The "power imbalance," and just what leeway artists (presumably not just those who are white) should have in depicting subjects of another race? What's at issue here is political correctness and cultural misappropriation. Sound familiar? 

 One wonders, should we go back through the history of Western art, identifying all the painting where an artist had some sort of "power imbalance" over a subject and/or where he or she depicted someone of a different race or culture and burn them? Or should we continue to evaluate them first and foremost on aesthetic considerations? We are, after all, talking about art.

 To be fair to Ms Shaw, the Times reported that in 2017 "she took pains to note that her work wasn’t intended to injure Wyeth’s reputation, but rather to layer it. "I love Wyeth,' she said. 'I think we can find artists to be complicated and frustrating and disappointing in some ways and still love the work.'" 

 Well, maybe Wyeth also wasn't trying to injure the Blacks depicted in his paintings, just lawyer them.

 I'll leave it up to readers to decide, but these are important issues in the current "cancel culture" mood of certain U.S. sociopolitical actors.