“There is no way the museum could let such an opportunity pass by.” The Wyeths were pleased by the proposal but stipulated that the exhibition must travel to areas in the Deep South with large African American populations. “Without a doubt, we wanted that show,” says Maass. Andrew Maass, director of the Mississippi Museum of Art, with the idea of organizing a more complete exhibition, bringing in works from major institutions and private collections. “Betsy Wyeth was astonished at how uncannily the essay coincided with their small exhibition,” says Sessums, “and invited me to see it.” Wyeth responded by inviting him to come to Chadd’s Ford and “get it right.” In the end, the painter was pleased with the sculpture, and Sessums, inspired by their many conversations, wrote an essay on Wyeth’s African American pictures, exploring the relationship between the painter and the painted. In 1996 Sessums had made a portrait bust of Wyeth, and he sent a picture to the artist for approval. The show grew out of a visit to the Brandywine museum by Kim Sessums, a physician, sculptor, and collector from Brookhaven, Mississippi. “I’m involved with the people I paint,” he says.
His sensuous depictions of Moore, who began posing for him in 1997, bring to mind the nude images of the blonde Helga Testorf, a German neighbor Wyeth secretly painted between 19. As a child, Wyeth played with the descendants of those men and women who settled in the region, and throughout his adult life, he painted them.
It is the first public overview of the artist’s depictions of the people and sites in a small African American community in Chadd’s Ford, which had been known as “Little Africa” and originated as a Quaker stop on the Underground Railroad. I’d have to be let into Winterthur by guards, and be ‘received.’ Then, in the afternoon, I’d walk over to Ben Loper’s house in the community,” recalls Wyeth, “and would be so much more relaxed, so much more natural.” The Loper portrait, A Crow Flew By-the words uttered by the subject as Wyeth painted him in 1950-is owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and numbers among the 74 paintings, watercolors, and drawings in the traveling exhibition “Andrew Wyeth: Close Friends,” which debuted at the Mississippi Museum of Art in Jackson, where it can be seen through the 13th of this month. Dupont in the morning, Wyeth walked over to Ben Loper’s house to have his friend pose.
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