Jamie Wyeth b. 1946

Warhol, Nureyev, Wyeth—the names entered America’s popular culture lexicon in the 1960s: when Andy Warhol exhibited his first Campbell’s Soup Cans in 1962; when Rudolf Nureyev danced before eleven million Americans via The Ed Sullivan Show in 1965; and when young Jamie Wyeth’s first New York solo exhibition in 1966 established him as another prodigious Wyeth talent, ensuring that the name Wyeth would endure as a formidable one in American art.

They were all of them constructs.

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Rudolf Nureyev, born a Russian peasant, was an unlikely dance prodigy, ultimately the star of the Kirov Ballet. With his dramatic defection from the Soviet Union in 1961, he reinvented himself in the West, expanding beyond classical ballet into American modern dance and becoming an international dance phenomenon and a movie star. He was the incarnation of a Romantic fairy-tale prince; in his athleticism and intensity, he was animal-like, fierce and formidable. On and off the stage, this exotic Russian could metamorphose at will.

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Nureyev, for all his image-consciousness, spurned Warhol’s overtures to paint him as another of the era’s glamourous heads, but he relented to Jamie Wyeth at this same time. The mere fact that a Wyeth had been brought into this avant-gardist circle proved a shock to the art world.

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Jamie Wyeth became fixated on painting Rudolf Nureyev at the height of the dancer’s popularity. When his ballet spectacular “Nureyev and Friends” arrived in New York in December 1974, Wyeth asked to sketch him but was rebuffed. [1] Nureyev was won over three years later, however, having recognized the value to him of Wyeth’s close connection to Kirstein and also the young artist’s stature in the Soviet émigré’s own homeland, where Wyeth toured as an art ambassador in 1975. [2] Wyeth was granted access during the intense, frenetic three-weeks when another production of “Nureyev and Friends” returned for a third season on Broadway in March 1977. [3]

Wyeth had to draw quickly, work incessantly, and accommodate himself to Nureyev’s erratic schedule and fierce personality. The short season’s work resulted in sketchbooks filled with the details of Nureyev’s features, head, torso, and proportions; some thirty developed studies made in combinations of pencil, ink, gouache, and acrylic colors; and one large oil. [4] The work marked the beginning of a close friendship for both Wyeths—for Jamie and his wife, Phyllis—that endured to the dancer’s death. [5] And it would serve as the foundation for posthumous portraits that Wyeth came to draw and paint so as to complete the kind of picture of Nureyev that the dancer had not allowed him to make—the picture of the man outside performance. [6] Nureyev was a man who lived between worlds—between staged fantasy and the cruel reality of one in forced exile from his Russian homeland, under constant threat from the Soviet KGB, and denied the open expression of his homosexuality. [7] His story could not be confined to ballet.

Nureyev’s signature leaps were less interesting to Wyeth, he said, than his shape-shifting. Wyeth watched Nureyev as he prepared to take the stage, acting out his performance in silence, morphing into the character he would become, as shown in “Nureyev Entering, Stage Left.” [8] Pierrot was the most anticipated of the three different solo roles Nureyev would dance each night that 1977 season. It was the first time Nureyev was seen in the role in New York, in a mesmerizing minimalist production of Arnold Schoenberg’s bleakly-scored story of a moonstruck clown who hides his broken heart under his mask of white face paint.

Just as it was with Warhol, Nureyev’s white mask is an essential part of all the studies, done on toned paper or paperboard. The theater and Nureyev’s incandescent personality further allowed for electric effects: white marble skin in the spotlight glowing bright against deep black backstage emptiness, and touches of brilliant acrylic colors.

The deaths of Warhol, in 1987, and Nureyev, in 1995, were moments for Wyeth to process all that he had absorbed of his famous subjects. From the remove of decades, he could call up discrete moments and arrange them into larger contexts. He painted his friends again as if they still lived, as the stuff of elaborate dreams, accommodating them into the surrealist direction that his painting was taking.

New paintings of both Warhol and Nureyev were triggered by eloquent objects from each man’s life. In the case of Nureyev, Wyeth had acquired costumes from the dancer’s estate. [9] These, together with the drawings, brought Nureyev to life again in the artist’s studio. The retrospective portraits of Nureyev are the most fully developed. Wyeth could now in his mind’s eye freeze those singular moments of Nureyev’s dance.

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Nureyev was just fifty-four years old when he succumbed to the ravages of AIDS. He danced and choreographed dance, unrelenting, to the very end. Nureyev’s final curtain call came only with his death. [10]

—Patricia Junker, excerpt from Jamie Wyeth, Andy Warhol, Rudolf Nureyev: Masquerade, Schoelkopf Gallery, 2024

[1] The novel production was testament to Nureyev’s mega-star status. It was staged at the Uris Theater on Broadway specifically to appeal to a large and broad audience. The program was a novel dance sampler that featured Nureyev in every ballet on the program at every performance—34 performances total in unflagging succession, an extraordinary feat for a dancer. See Clive Barnes, “Ballet: A Massive Stint,” New York Times, December 28, 1974, p. 14.

[2] Jamie and Phyllis Wyeth both shared with Nureyev biographer Julie Kavanaugh their reckoning that there had been a transactional element to Nureyev’s long delayed decision to collaborate on a portrait, since he needed Kirstein’s patronage. See Julie Kavanaugh, Rudolf Nureyev: The Life (London: Penguin Books, 2007), pp. 504-505. The latter consideration in Nureyev’s change of heart, Wyeth’s stature in the Soviet Union, is cited by the artist in the film, Jamie Wyeth and the Unflinching Eye, directed by Glenn Halsten, 2024, PrimeVideo: https:primevideo.com: Jamie-Wyeth-and-the-Unflinching-Eye.

[3] See Clive Barnes, “Nureyev and Friends,” New York Times, March 2, 1977, p. 6.

[4] See Lauren Raye Smith, “Nureyev Revisited: James Wyeth’s Portraits,” and “Selected Chronology of James Wyeth,” in Capturing Nureyev: James Wyeth Paints the Dancer (Rockland, Maine: Farnsworth Art Museum, 2002), pp. 41-66, 85.

[5] Phyllis Mills Wyeth kept a diary account of her long friendship with Nureyev which she shared with Nureyev biographer Kavanaugh (Kavanaugh, pp. 504-505) and excerpted as her contribution to the Farnsworth Art Museum catalogue, “Remembering Rudolf,” Ibid., pp. 18-25.

[6] As Wyeth explained to Kavanaugh, p. 503; and in the 2024 film, Jamie Wyeth and the Unflinching Eye.

[7] For a richly detailed look at Nureyev’s life and death in exile, see the French television documentary, One Day, One Destiny, produced by Magneto Presse, presented by Robert Delahouse, broadcast March 11, 2025; distributed through Documentation Société, YouTube: youtube.com.

[8] See Lauren Raye Smith, p. 45.

[9] Now in the Collection of the Brandywine River Museum of Art, Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania.

[10] See the documentary, One Day, One Destiny.