Just before my arrival at Brandywine Museum of Art I was working in Connecticut at the Florence Griswold Museum, where I had just mounted a major exhibition on the photographer Walker Evans. One morning I was asked to give a tour to a contemporary photographer—a VIP from New York—who had come to see the show.

A few months later the same photographer was back in Connecticut, opening an exhibition at the Wadsworth Atheneum of his new work about Andrew Wyeth. It was an unexpected turn, to say the least, since I had just accepted the position here at Brandywine. At the opening, I learned that he was absolutely over the moon for Wyeth’s paintings and was looking forward to the next time he could visit Chadds Ford.

The photographer, of course, was James Welling.

Where Welling and Wyeth “Meet”

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It wasn’t difficult to see that Welling’s Wyeth material would make a fantastic exhibition for the Brandywine. He had already been visiting our historic properties for years shooting photographs and getting to know our staff.

As the Things Beyond Resemblance: James Welling Photographs exhibition has come together, I’ve gotten to see the work of Andrew Wyeth through the lens (forgive the pun) of James Welling, who is remarkably knowledgeable on the painter’s life and work. While the art historian fusses over distilling fiction and fact, the artist has a more immediate experience of the work.

The way one artist views and uses the work of another artist is one of the themes of the exhibition. In the case of James Welling, he never met Andrew Wyeth but he has—very humbly—walked in his footsteps. It takes a true enthusiast to find joy in the discovery of paint splatters and smudges at a house where Wyeth was known to have painted.

Welling not only discovered them, but documented them as well. Like an intrepid archeologist, armed with Google Maps, unearthing traces of a lost civilization, Welling explored the dustiest corners and muddiest riverbanks of Chadds Ford searching for Wyeth.

The Strength of the Unexpected

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The most interesting thing to me was that when James Welling found those places—the exact spot where Andrew Wyeth must have stood to make a sketch or painting—he sometimes turned in the opposite direction and made a photograph of something else entirely.

There are many art pilgrims out there who yearn to stand in Monet’s garden and paint the Japanese bridge from the exact spot that he did. But how many go to Giverny and then turn their back on the bridge to paint what Monet didn’t? That’s where the strength in Welling’s work lies—his ability to absorb these lessons from Wyeth and use them to make a work that is his own.

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Things Beyond Resemblance: James Welling Photographs is supported by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. The planning of this exhibition has been supported by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage.