A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS AN OLD MAN : BIO TURNS PUBLIC EYE ON WYETH.

Byline: Ralph Blumenthal The New York Times

Andrew Wyeth is still alive. He proved it the other day by ordering a Bloody Mary, a shrimp cocktail (``Five shrimp, please'') and sweet-potato fries.

Sure, he said over lunch at the colonial Chadds Ford Inn in the Brandywine country of Pennsylvania - home to three generations of painting Wyeths - he and his wife, Betsy, had resisted publication of a confidant's revealing new biography.

And now here was the book, ``Andrew Wyeth: A Secret Life,'' with his scowling countenance staring from bookstore shelves. People may have thought he had died, and more than a few critics may have wished he had. But no, he said, his impish face seamed with leathery creases over a worn gray Irish sweater, ``I'm not dead yet.''

At 79, Wyeth, who has conjured some of the most arresting popular images of the age and reaped extraordinary financial success, still paints every day, plowing through fields and riverbeds in a beat-up GMC Suburban with a sketch pad on the seat.

Despite the near-fatal loss of most of a lung many years ago, along with a recent hip operation and some frailties of age, he works in a frenzy and always has. He bridles at labels, including the seemingly irrefutable one of ``realist,'' calling himself ``elusive'' instead.

He has, of course, long been the bane of much of the art establishment, and critics during the years have dismissed him as a pop icon and sentimentalist, a glorified Norman Rockwell, too accessible, successful and popular with the public to be important.

It is, in fact, in repudiation of their scorn, as well as to demonstrate that his subjects are not mere conceits but real slices of Americana, that Wyeth has used the publication of the biography to break a long silence. (He did cooperate with Thomas Hoving, a longtime supporter and former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, on ``Autobiography,'' an annotated book based on an exhibition of his works, in 1995.)

Artful enigma?

``To say I'm this or I'm that,'' he said, impatiently waving off categorization. ``What you have to do is break all the rules.''

He said he was out to capture ``the depth in every object,'' and he believed, like Constable, that ``you don't have to make things up, you don't have to put in animals or people, you just have to sit there, and it will appear.''

During a daylong conversation that coursed from the studio where he learned to draw at the feet of his father, the renowned illustrator Newell Convers Wyeth, to the settings and subjects of some of his most famous works, Wyeth talked about his life today, his family history and his art.

``I can't get going on a picture unless I have a real reason to paint it, unless it gets me excited,'' he said. ``I have to feel the hair raised on my neck. It's all strictly unconscious.''

He was on guard against prettiness in his art, he said, recalling that he once had thrown water over a finished portrait. `` `It was beautiful - why did you do that?' '' he said the model had objected. ``That's the trouble,'' he went on. ``It was too beautiful.''

Although the new biography, by Richard Meryman, a longtime friend of the Wyeths, offers a warts-and-all look at a strange if gifted clan, Wyeth voiced no regrets at having cooperated with the author. ``I wanted it so tough that I wouldn't read it,'' he said with a laugh. In fact, he said, he did not read most of it. ``Betsy read me two chapters,'' he added. ``I said, `No more, I might not like him anymore.' ''

Family obsessions

The book, coupling admiration for Wyeth's work with striking revelations about his personal affairs, has received mixed reviews. Based on many years of conversations with the Wyeths and with family members, it recounts the overpowering influence of N.C. Wyeth on his children and Andrew's fascination with the violence underlying everyday life, his fear of confinement, his compulsive secrecy and his strong attachments to his models.

One of these, a neighbor, Helga Testorf, became the focus of a 15-year artistic obsession that genuinely rocked the Wyeths' marriage, despite the enduring skepticism of critics who insist that the affair was concocted for publicity.

Portrait of the biographer

Meryman is a former writer and editor for Life magazine and the son of a landscape painter and portraitist, also named Richard, who directed the art school of the Corcoran Gallery in Washington in the 1920s and '30s. He first interviewed the Wyeths in 1964, and worked toward the book during the next 32 years, although the Wyeths, he said, didn't sit for formal interviews or want him to take notes in their presence.

The writer remains close to the family, bound to it by a shared tragedy that lurks like the menace behind so many seemingly placid Wyeth still lifes and landscapes. When he and his first wife, Hope, who later died of cancer, visited the Wyeths in Chadds Ford more than 30 years ago to show off their newborn daughter, the baby, laid to sleep in the Wyeths' living room, regurgitated milk and choked to death.

Although some critics have deemed the book credulous and partisan, Meryman insisted that he was no ``apologist and worshiper'' of the artist. He said he had written a tough, investigative book that explored Wyeth's fascination with the grotesque and left few family skeletons untouched.

He examines, for instance, the peculiar infatuation between N.C. Wyeth and a daughter-in-law, Caroline Wyeth, shortly before the patriarch's car stalled at a railroad crossing and was struck by a train, which killed him and Caroline's 4-year-old son, Newell, in 1945. The book reports family speculation that N.C. Wyeth may have committed suicide, but Meryman now says he regards the account as unsubstantiated and would like to remove it from subsequent editions.

Wyatt country

Chadds Ford, between Philadelphia and Wilmington, Del., is a kind of ``Wyeth's World,'' as austere and haunting in its way as ``Christina's World,'' Wyeth's widely known painting of his crippled friend Christina Olson, crawling toward her desolate farmhouse in Maine. This time of year, the wintry ground stretches tight like skin over the bare hills, and the stubbly brown grass is finely crosshatched, as if by strokes of the artist's brush.

The Wyeths are a kind of cottage industry in Chadds Ford, where the inn, built in 1736, has menus decorated with Wyeth's sketch of Washington and Lafayette, who were routed there by the British.

After lunch, with most of his Bloody Mary and fries untouched, he took the wheel of his Suburban and, clattering over the railroad tracks where, he paused to note, the train had killed his father, drove to the farm of his friends Karl and Anna Kuerner, who figure in many of his paintings. Karl, an avid hunter and a German machine-gunner in World War I, died in 1979 at 80, but his widow, Anna, 97, still lives in the 200-year-old farmhouse.

Their sunlit kitchen table, set with knife, plate, cup and saucer, was the setting for a 1959 tempera, ``Ground Hog Day,'' a scene of eerie calm against the background eerie calm against the background of a violently sawed log, almost fanged, visible through the window.

Upstairs, a top-floor room still exposes the ominous meat hooks and cracked ceiling against which Wyeth posed Karl Kuerner in 1948. In the adjacent sewing room, Wyeth painted his first nude of Helga.

CAPTION(S):

2 Photos

Photo: (1) ``I'm not dead yet,'' says Andrew Wyeth, 79, in the Chadds Ford, Pa., studio of his father, renowned illustrator Newell Convers Wyeth.

The New York Times

(2) One of the artist's models, Helga Testorf, became the focus of a 15-year obsession that rocked the Wyeths' marriage, despite the enduring skepticism of critics who insist that the affair was concocted for publicity.