He was wearing knickers and mismatched high socks -- essentially, still in short pants, like a little kid. He is 68 years old, but struck me as childlike. I recognize the quality from meeting other artists over the decades, so that wasn't offputting in itself, but I wondered if he would be that way even if he hadn't gone into art. It is true that Jamie Wyeth has had a burden to bear -- famous father and grandfather. At the same time, he has been given great opportunities as a result of that family legacy, and it's hard to look at this show and not think those opportunities haven't been squandered. If you go -- it's at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and will travel to three other venues, Brandywine, San Antonio and Crystal Bridges -- there are five galleries, over 100 works, ranging from something he did at age three all the way up to the present, a portrait of Rockwell Kent, in whose house he lives on Monhegan Island. Speaking of which, when I told the young gallerist Adam Adelson that I was going there for five days in August, he looked genuinely alarmed. That's because he knows the place only from Jamie Wyeth's paintings of it, including those frightening seagulls, seven paintings of them meant to represent the seven deadly sins. They are in the last room of this show, a darkened space, very creepy. I had seen them before, at the Farnsworth Museum of Art in Maine, and didn't like them there. Here I genuinely wanted to flee them. To be fair, the artist was very personable, and seemingly modest about his work, telling us that having a retrospective was a "very painful" experience, "like being in a room where everyone is reading your new novel -- you feel like a jackass." But again it seemed like something a much younger artist might say, someone still getting used to his celebrity. And speaking of that, it's unfortunate that he spent so much of his time painting people like Warhol, Nureyev, the Kennedys, Arnold Schwarznegger... Wait a minute. Arnold Schwarznegger? Yes, a three-quarter portrait of the young bodybuilder shirtless showing his muscles of course, and the signage says that the painting has been lent by the Arnold Schwarznegger collection. No wonder I gravitated to the dog portraits, even after the assembled press was told by a Bank of America person that the great one called Kleberg, which is on the catalog cover, also "will be making an appearance on ATM machines throughout the city." ATM machines? Really? To be fair again, he has painted many people who aren't celebrities, including the wild child Orca Bates, whom he described as "more of a seagull than a person," if I heard him correctly. In the question and answer period I asked him where his model Orca Bates was now. He said that, like many island children, he had a difficult tradition, but that he lives in New York City and is "in construction." It would be interesting to find out if Orca himself ever grew up; he is 30 years old. Besides the gulls, there are other birds: ravens, crows. Besides the dogs, there are other animals, notably sheep. Maybe, like a child, he identifies more closely with animals. Another detail that solidified the child impression for me was the sight of his wife, Phyllis, in a wheelchair. It was sad to see, in the many portraits he has done of her, how beautiful she once was. They married after the car accident that disabled her at age 21. If seen on the street, they would be taken for mother and son. But he isn't seen on all that many streets, or so he said: He doesn't travel much. He wants to paint a tree he's grown up with, not a tree that he's never seen before. In sum, he said, as the cameras flashed away: "I'm kind of a boring person, because all I do is paint."
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