Ghosts, dead bodies, Michael Jackson & Andy Warhol haunt Jamie Wyeth's new exhibition

If the eerie, tinkling bell music box music at the entrance doesn't give you the shivers, the ghostly, wide-eyed staring portrait of Michael Jackson or the nightmarish diorama of a butcher shop with buckets of blood and dismembered animal body parts should do it.

"Jamie Wyeth: Unsettled," a new exhibition from the Chadds Ford artist at the Brandywine Museum of Art, features more than 50 works drawn from the museum and private collections and is designed to leave visitors with emotions ranging from anxiety to dread.

Visitors viewing the imagery can "examine their own darker sides," says Curator Amanda C. Burdan.

The exhibition is divided into three sections with the titles "Strangers and Specters," "The Natural and Supernatural Worlds" and "Haunted Places and Disturbing Spaces."

"My life has been full of ghosts," says Wyeth.

After viewing the exhibition, which includes sketches from a morgue and paintings of decapitated deer and a burning cow carcass, it may not be so hard to believe.

"You're even weirder than I am," said author Stephen King during his first meeting with Wyeth after the author asked the artist to create drawings for a TV series "Kingdom Hospital" that King developed in 2004.

The Jamie Wyeth exhibition is now on view at the Brandywine until June 9. It then travels to four other museums, including sites in Maine, South Carolina, Ohio, and Washington State.

Here's what to expect.

Make no mistake: Jamie Wyeth is no stranger to strange

Jamie Wyeth, the son of the famed American artist Andrew Wyeth and the grandson of artist/illustrator N. C. Wyeth, has long been known for honing in on disconcerting subjects. "Wondrous Strange" was an exhibition at the Delaware Art Museum in the late 1990s that showed the Wyeth family of artists, and N.C. Wyeth's teacher/painter Howard Pyle, shared an interest in surrealism, eeriness and eccentric imagination.

The weird world of Jamie Wyeth starts right at the beginning of the exhibition with some items from his own personal collection: a taxidermic dog sitting on a pillow next to a creepy mâché and mixed media clown and acrobatic pig musical automation made in France in 1880.

Wyeth's houses and studios are filled with pieces from his taxidermy collection, and the clown and pig automaton, a 19th-century mechanical device that performs 20 movements to four music box songs, is one of only four known to exist.

The slightly unnerving pieces convey that this contemporary Wyeth exhibition strays well beyond the Brandywine School of Painting.

He sees dead people

Wyeth, 77, only attended school until the sixth grade and then was tutored at home. He did not attend art school. But Wyeth studied anatomy by working in a morgue alongside a doctor and examining corpses.

"It wasn't ghoulish on my part," he says of his "Morgue Sketchbook" from 1965 to 1966. "I was just curious."

Wyeth dissected bodies and says for years his sketchbooks smelled like formaldehyde.

"I'm actually a pretty boring person. Painting. That's all I do. I have no hobbies," Wyeth says, laughing.

While he never knew his grandfather N.C. who was killed in 1945 with his grandson Newell when the car they were riding in was hit by a train near their Chadds Ford home, Wyeth says N.C.'s studio was "a magical place" for him. He has spent hours going through N.C.'s illustrations.

"Apples: Fifth in the Screen Door Sequence" is a 2021 piece from a "screened door" series that depicts figures inside a building. But in this assemblage, an opened screen door shows a portrait of the late N.C. Wyeth in a green haze outside in an orchard. Apples, a favorite snack of N.C. Wyeth's, float in the air, and the artist is shown gathering the fruit in this supernatural world.

During a tour recently at the museum, Jamie Wyeth stopped to view the assemblage and the resemblance between him and his grandfather isn't hard to miss due to their curly hair and style of dress.

Jamie, like N.C., wears knickers splattered with paint, but adds a more 21st-century touch to his look with mismatched socks, one black and one blue polka-dotted, and kicky flame red, Austrian-made Giesswein merino wool sneakers.

What's up with the Michael Jackson portrait?

Celebrities have floated in and out of the Wyeth circle. Michael Jackson was a fan and was photographed with both Jamie and Andrew Wyeth. In 1985, just a few years after "Thriller" was released, the pop singer visited Chadds Ford to view the works of N.C. Wyeth. He also wanted Andrew Wyeth to paint his portrait.

According to the 1996 biography "Andrew Wyeth, a Secret Life" by Richard Meryman, Jackson, and Wyeth met at what was then called the Brandywine River Museum (the name was changed about two years ago to Brandywine Museum of Art) and toured the building.

While Andrew felt a connection, he was put off by Jackson's large entourage, felt sorry for the pop star, and declined to do the portrait, according to Meryman.

The singer in Jamie's 1985 portrait of Jackson, who died in 2009, has a ghostly pallor and a haunted expression. The frame surrounding the portrait was a gift from Jamie's father Andrew.

Other celebrities in the exhibition include a 2015 oil on canvas of the late Andy Warhol and Warhol's dog Archie inside an antique wooden door. Warhol was a longtime friend of Jamie's and celebrated Thanksgiving at his Chadds Ford home. The fleeting moment is Wyeth's reminder to cherish friends and loved ones who may be in our lives only briefly.

"The Faune" from 1977 and 2002 is Wyeth's version of his friend ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev as a satyr-like mythological creature complete with horns. Wyeth did a series of studies and paintings of Nureyev, who performed at The Playhouse Theatre in Wilmington in a 1989 production of "The King and I." "Nureyev's Eyes" was a play about the two men performed in 2016 at the Delaware Theatre Company.

Wyeth has something to say about today's politics

One of the most powerful images in the exhibition is "Poison: Seventh in the Screen Door Sequence," one of Wyeth's most recent pieces.

The 2022 assemblage shows two opened doors with splintered and shattered glass. A portrait of an injured bald eagle is in the center of the doors.

Wyeth says the piece was his reaction to the Jan. 6, 2021 attack, on the United States Capitol Building in Washington, D.C.

"Right at the time when I was so distressed, as everybody was about that event, I found, early in the morning, a bald eagle on my island [in Maine], who was stumbling around," Wyeth says. He says he called wildlife experts to help the eagle, but it died.

"It was a tribute to [the eagle] and it was about Jan. 6th, the broken doors, the glass," said Wyeth, who said the doors on the piece were constructed to look like the broken Senate door windows, before adding "I'm telling too much."

This isn't the first time Wyeth has made a political statement through his work. In 1969, during the Vietnam War, Wyeth, then 23, was an airman third class in the Delaware Air National Guard. He painted a mural "Adam and Eve and the C-97"  on parachute nylon. The subject, reflecting the fall of innocence, was Wyeth's statement about the war.

In 2019, some Delaware Air National Guard officials discussed altering the nude figures on the mural that's at the guard's 80-acre base at the New Castle County Airport. Those talks eventually ceased.

Wyeth told Delaware Online/The News Journal in a 2019  interview he would not make any changes, if asked, to the Delaware Air National Guard mural.

"It should stand as a work created at a particularly divisive time ... ditto our times right now," Wyeth said.

Wyeth's dioramas are back, and there could be more

During a 2015 retrospective exhibition of Wyeth's work at the Brandywine Museum of Art, Wyeth showed, for the first time to the public, several "tableaux vivant" or dioramas he created including Andy Warhol's "The Factory Dining Room and Truman Capote and Rudolf Nureyev, dining at the famed New York restaurant  La Côte Basque.

Wyeth says he made the dioramas from memory, strictly for his pleasure — "I felt like a voyeur," he said — and never planned to show them. But when they were featured at several museums, Wyeth says he was shocked at the reaction. "They were the most popular things in my exhibition."

His latest diorama "Butcher Shop" created in 2015 is a startling, gory tableau that has an almost "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" quality to it. The scene shows a hulking butcher with gray-tinged skin and decaying teeth who grimaces as he holds a cleaver in one hand and dips his other hand into a bucket of blood. All around him are meat hooks and animal parts.

Wyeth hinted that there might be more dioramas in his future.

Want more chillbumps? Nearby the diorama hangs "Bones of a Whale" from 2006, a painting of whale bones, which Wyeth admits "is something macabre," and includes a portrait of his mother Betsy. And closer still, is the 1965 painting "Below the Barn," which shows the scene of a dead cow on a Chadds Ford farm that has been set ablaze.

Wyeth says when his brother sold the painting to a Seattle art museum not everyone was aware of the subject matter.

"It's a cow that's burning," Wyeth remembers his brother telling the museum.

"The board went 'What??''' he says, chuckling.

The Kennedy portraits and connections

One of Wyeth's most iconic images is his 1967 portrait of the late president John F. Kennedy Jr., which was acquired in 2014 by the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. That portrait is not in this exhibition, but Wyeth has paintings from 2013 of several other Kennedy family members including Patricia, Joe, Rose, Jean and Ted Kennedy.

Wyeth has previously painted Ted Kennedy and strolled the grounds at the 1989 Winterthur Museum Point-to-Point steeplechase races with the Massachusetts senator after both participated in the carriage parade.

Wyeth's wife Phyllis Wyeth, who died in 2019, also worked for then-U.S. Sen. John F. Kennedy, and later in the Kennedy White House with the president's special assistant.

Wyeth, who said he always painted "for an audience of one, Phyllis," includes a portrait of her in his 2017 "Spring, The Hanging of the Tree Rocks," an acrylic and oil on a wood panel.

Familiar Delaware people and places

Wyeth says over the years, he studied a sycamore tree along the Brandywine River that was on the property of the late George "Frolic" Weymouth, a neighbor, artist, founder of Brandywine Museum and Conservancy, and well-known for leading the carriage procession at Winterthur's annual Point to Point races.

Wyeth did one painting of the tree in a much smaller size and then returned for a much larger 2019 painting "Roots, Revisited" that takes up one wall of the museum.

"So, to me, it really is a portrait of Frolic," Wyeth says of his friend, who died in 2016. The tree is shown not from its canopy but rather from its twisted tangle of roots that explores the world underneath the forest floor.

"The uncanny thing, I went and sat in my jeep and literally painted it on the spot. The day I finished it, it [the tree] fell over," said Wyeth, who paints almost every day.

Other paintings in the exhibition with ties to Delaware include a 2010 oil on canvas called "The du Ponts of Delaware Study," "Hill Girt Farm" from 2000 (it's the farm owned by the Haskell family who run the popular SIW Vegetables stand) and 2022's "Through the Cornfields of Granogue," the estate owned by the late Irénée du Pont that was recently sold to Longwood Gardens.

Art world controversy: Delaware Air National Guard considered covering buttocks in 50-year-old Jamie Wyeth mural

"Most of my paintings really are done not with me sitting in front of an easel. They are done in bed at night dreaming. I always keep a tablet by my bed because I wake up in the middle of the night and start drawing sometimes. In the morning when I wake up it's like leaves everywhere.

"They are all kind of hieroglyphics. You really can't tell what the hell it is. And then I have a fascinating time to figure how, 'What was I thinking of? What was I thinking of? And a lot of paintings have come out of that."

If you want to read more stories from Patricia Talorico, visit delawareonline.com/staff/2646617001/patricia-talorico You can find her on Instagram, X (formerly Twitter) and Facebook. Email ptalorico@delawareonline.com or leave a message at 302-324-2861. Sign up for her Delaware Eats newsletter.

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This article originally appeared on Delaware News Journal: Blood, dead deer & Michael Jackson haunt Jamie Wyeth's new art exhibit