It’s November now, and despite unseasonably mild temperatures at the start of the month, the long shadows and short days feel unmistakably autumnal. It’s Andrew Wyeth weather, I think. Crisp, starry nights. Bare trees and tall grasses blanching on the margins of a local park. A Blood Moon rising at dusk. An eclipse. Secrets. Stillness.
Andrew Wyeth, the American painter best known for his solitary figures and tonal vistas, once said, “I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape—the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it; the whole story doesn't show.”
Wyeth knew a little something about bone structure. When the young artist began to work from life, he had already spent several months studying a skeleton given to him by his father, the artist and illustrator N. C. Wyeth.
“[The skeleton] was a marvelous revelation,” Wyeth said. “I drew it hundreds of times from every conceivable angle.”
Later, N. C. Wyeth challenged his son—removing the skeleton without warning—and the young Wyeth was forced to work from memory; “to [draw] it, in a sense, intuitively.”
Wyeth described the loss of his first muse as “a blow”.
Wyeth remembered his father as a controlling figure: “Pa kept me almost in a jail, just kept me to himself in my own world, and he wouldn't let anyone in on it.”
In the fall of 1945, N. C. Wyeth was killed by a freight train at a level crossing near their home in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania.
“I was sick I had never painted him,” Wyeth admitted. But: “With his death,” Wyeth added, “the landscape took on a meaning—the quality of him.” The hillside, overlooking the crash site, “became a portrait of him.”
Of the boy bounding down the hill, Wyeth remarked, “It was me, at a loss—that hand drifting in the air was my free soul, groping.”
When Wyeth graduated to live models, he recruited local people from his neighbourhood, not professionals. If the skeleton had been a revelation, this was another, as Wyeth’s models gave him something those old bones could not: life.
Wyeth’s models worked for three or four hours per session, with a break of roughly fifteen minutes between poses. Soon, Wyeth realized he worked best when his models were at ease.
“That’s when they would sit or stand or relax in truly human positions. That was really the human figure. That taught me action, taught me to capture them in movement… I was getting something absolutely real, akin to human nature.”1
In an echo of his early artistic practice, Wyeth quietly observed his models in natural, spontaneous positions; drawing them later from memory.
“[E]ven if the subject was not before me, I would have a subject so deeply within my memory—whether it was still or moving rather rapidly—so that when I started to paint it, it was there in my mind more vividly perhaps than if it were physically present.”
The body, with all its fallibilities—disease, dis/ability and decline—grounded Wyeth’s practice, but his mind, and memory, brought it to life.
…Baby one more time
Between 1971 and 1985, Andrew Wyeth worked with Helga Testorf, a neighbour in Chadds Ford. Their partnership, as painter and muse, resulted in a collection of more than 240 paintings, but Wyeth and Testorf worked in secret; a fifteen-year collaboration Wyeth sensationally revealed in 1986.
The news was a surprise even to his own wife Betsy, who, as his business manager, spoke with The New York Times about her husband’s freshly-revealed body of work.
“He doesn't like his models to talk, he doesn't like personality,” she said, speaking from her own experience as Wyeth’s model. “You just feel here is this extraordinary director, like Bergman. He brings out the best qualities in you, he subtly directs you.”
Reporting on the story, The New York Times observed,
“In the world of Andrew Wyeth's paintings, things are not always what they seem. Frequently, for example, he will paint many images on a gesso panel or paper, only to erase them or to paint over them another image that he believes better expresses the inner spirit of the erased or ‘underpainted’ image.”2
In a 1976 exhibition catalogue, Wyeth asked, “Why shouldn’t one make dozens and dozens of pictures of the same subject?” And why not? After all, that’s how he began his artistic practice.
So: Why shouldn’t one make dozens and dozens of pictures of the same subject? With Stable Diffusion, DALL·E 2, and the other AI text-to-image generators, you can do just that.
Free Britney
Earlier this week, I read Kerry Howley’s deeply-researched family history of Britney Spears, The curse of Kentwood. Set in the small town of Kentwood, Louisiana (“a place where you can be an outsider for 17 years,” wrote Howley) the article loops backward and forward across time; from Britney’s grandparents, and her father’s traumatic childhood, to the dawn of Britney’s stardom, and the years-long legal battle between the star and her family.
It’s been a year since Britney Spears was released from a thirteen-year conservatorship in which her father kept her career, her finances, and her day-to-day life under tight control.
In that time, Spears’ communications were monitored. She was not permitted to spend even small amounts of money. And she was required to have an IUD fitted. (Now in her early forties, Spears has said she wants another child.)
More than once, Britney’s father, Jamie, is said to have raged, “I am Britney Spears!”
A few weeks ago, I was inspired to type “Britney Spears painted by Andrew Wyeth” into Stable Diffusion. The result: a compelling series of images in the style of Wyeth’s meticulous tempera paintings.
Stable Diffusion captures the hallmarks of Wyeth’s style—moody skies, rising hilltops, and lonely homesteads—while placing Spears (all bleached-blonde hair and bare limbs) into the scene like an apparition; a young woman haunting the rolling hills of Chadds Ford.
Like many of Wyeth’s models, including Christina Olson, of Christina’s world, Britney appears supine; clawing her gnarled fingers into the grass. There’s a restlessness here, emphasized by her skittish expression, and the windblown quality of her hair. Britney seems half-buried, as if caught in a trap. Her hands splay into contorted bundles, like bolete mushrooms rising up from the cool, damp earth.
In so many of Stable Diffusion’s renderings, Britney does not meet our gaze. She appears in repose—resting, reclining, even retreating—but not, perhaps, of her own free will.
Free Britney, indeed.
Stable Diffusion so often positions Britney’s body away from us—a stylistic device that poignantly underscores the scrutiny the pop star has lived under for most of her life.
Like Wyeth watching his models at rest, Stable Diffusion has rendered Britney at random; borrowing from a dataset of Wyeth’s aesthetics and Britney’s. And yet, the results so often see Britney ill-at-ease; hounded and alone.
It’s perhaps a telling artifact of the trove of images made of Britney Spears over the past twenty-five years—many of them made by men. Text-to-image models like Stable Diffusion and DALL·E 2 are trained on large collections of imagery, so it’s not hard to imagine that the biases and ‘ways of seeing’ found in the original images would be reflected in those generated by Artificial Intelligence.
“Britney Spears was not treated as a person. She was treated as a commodity or even a consumable… she was there to serve a purpose as subject for a supply of pictures,” said paparazzo Nick Stern.
Many of those pictures, including images of Britney sexualized as a teenager, or hounded by paparazzi during the darkest years of her fame, are likely found in the datasets used to train text-to-image models like Stable Diffusion.
For her part, Britney acknowledged how her portraitists manipulated her.
“How did I realise [I was a sex symbol]? Probably the first Rolling Stone cover by David LaChapelle. He came in and did the photos and totally tricked me. They were really cool but I didn’t really know what the hell I was doing. And, to be totally honest with you, at the time I was 16, so I really didn’t. I was back in my bedroom, and I had my little sweater on and he was like, ‘Undo your sweater a little bit more.’”3
Since the end of her long conservatorship, much has been made of Britney’s online nudity. The pop star occasionally appears fully undressed on Twitter and Instagram; in photos that would, in an earlier generation, have only seen the light of day had she been hacked by a tabloid. These days, Britney leaks her own nudes, thank you very much.
But: Britney’s newfound liberation, expressed through her chaotic online presence, has raised fresh concerns among fans and onlookers. In The curse of Kentwood, Kerry Howley wrote,
“She posted endless [Instagram] Reels of herself twirling wildly in yellow ruffles and dark eyeliner… She seemed unwell. Missing was the control that had turned her into someone we thought we knew: Britney’s unparalleled command of her body, her mastery of self-presentation, that sense that she could become precisely the person she wanted us to see. The connection had been ruptured. The It was gone.”4
Below, Britney’s self-confident expression is belied by a glassy stare. In a stylish button-down blouse, Britney appears startled, casting her gaze off into the distance. What’s coming? Who’s there? Only Britney knows.
In another rendering, Britney is clad in a double denim outfit reminiscent of her iconic 2001 look with Justin Timberlake. Her eyes meet ours like a horror movie monster. And where are her hands? Again, these images raise more questions than they can answer.
Not yet a woman
In 1967, Andrew Wyeth made a quick sketch of a thirteen-year-old girl he’d met in Maine, while scouting some property with his wife. A few months later, after his longtime muse Christina Olson died, Wyeth returned to Maine for Olson’s funeral. Passing the property they’d viewed earlier, Wyeth thought, ‘Gosh, that little girl’s in there.’
“I was really hanging onto the thought,” said Wyeth, later, “because I could realize that that moment was the end of Olsons… It was almost as if [the child] symbolized a rebirth of something fresh out of death.”
The following spring, Wyeth returned to Maine, where he asked the girl’s parents for permission to paint her portrait. Wyeth suggested he might paint her in the barn, but her father wasn’t keen on the idea. It was spring and the barn was needed. Best work in the sauna, he declared, as it was unused.
Alone with the teen in the sauna, Wyeth “made a drawing of her by the window, sitting there with a towel around her.”
When Betsy Wyeth saw the sketch, she said, “It’s a shame you couldn’t get her to take off that towel.”
“[Her father] will shoot me,” said Wyeth, “you know, she’s fourteen years old.”
But, Wyeth recalled, “Betsy put the seed in my mind. That’s all I needed.”
Like David LaChapelle asking a teenage Britney Spears to undo just one more button, Wyeth asked his model whether she would pose “without the towel covering the upper part of her body”.
By the time she was fifteen, Wyeth had painted her fully nude.
“You’re going to have trouble with this picture,” said Betsy, when that portrait, The Virgin, was finished.
Wyeth recalled: “It was remarkable, like finding a young doe in the woods.”
Wyeth’s words in this post come from two sources, a 1976 exhibition catalogue published by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and his 1965 LIFE interview.
Quoted in Tavi Gevinson’s 2021 essay, Britney Spears was never in control.