Photo By Cincinnati Art Museum

Andrew Wyeth's "Grain Bag" (1959) is an example the artist's attention to detail.

I last saw an Andrew Wyeth exhibition years ago, when I lived on the East Coast and the sophisticates I usually hung out with couldn't be bothered with a show by an artist so far out of vogue. The person who did go with me, a natural sophisticate rather than somebody who has to work at it, looked for a long time at a painting that was, in essence, a portrait of a milking pail.

"I never knew there was so much poetry in a milk pail," he said, nailing exactly what it is that Wyeth does. He finds the poetry in places where we didn't know it existed.

The excitement of the exhibition now at the Cincinnati Art Museum (CAM) is that it shows us how Wyeth finds the poetry. These works, many of them preparatory studies and almost all on paper, are so immediate and personal that you can see ideas tried out, sometimes elaborated on, sometimes discarded.

"You're in his head in this exhibition," says his blonde, 28-year-old granddaughter Victoria Wyeth, who was present for the opening.

Andrew Wyeth's only grandchild, she has opted out of making art, even though three generations of Wyeths have been artists: Her great-grandfather, N.C. Wyeth, was a famous illustrator, and her Uncle Jamie is a noted painter now. Instead, she's chosen to be an interpreter and ambassador for her grandfather's works.

Not that they need it. Their appeal is so universal, their touch so sure that everyone can respond, except perhaps hard-core art intellectuals. This exhibition focuses on the most famous of his subjects, the Olson family and the weathered Maine house Christina Olson and her brother Alvaro lived in, and spans the 30 years of their association, 1939-1969.

CAM is the first stop on a U.S. tour for these works, usually accessible only at Marunuma Art Park, Japan, where collector Katsushige Susaki provides studios and encouragement for young artists.

On the auspicious day when Andrew Wyeth first met his future wife, Betsy, she took him (testing, testing) to see how he would respond to her friends, the Olsons. Their house was far from fancy, and the Olsons themselves so representative of the flinty Maine culture that positive response was no sure thing. But Andrew simply got out his painting materials and made a watercolor of the house. It's the first work in the exhibition.

He would go on painting that house as well as the life within it until both Olsons had died. In the exhibition's final room, studies of the elegiac "End of Olsons" tell us how he closed off this long source of inspiration: He decided on a high view, from an upper window, showing the steep slant of the roof, the kitchen chimney, and as the work develops, he makes the cove where Alvaro fished part of the composition. Here, as elsewhere in the exhibition, we can see a reproduction of the final work, the culmination of the studies we've just been looking at.

"Christina's World" has become so iconic a painting that it hovers at the edge of cliché and even invites parody. A recent New York Times art review was illustrated by appropriation artist Richard Prince's photograph of his girlfriend in the grass in front of a house remarkably like the Olson's. Driving in Maine, Prince saw the house and had to respond.

Most of us react emotionally rather than with a specific action to the painting, and like any real art it means different things to different individuals. But to see how Wyeth went about it, as we can here, from the 1948 pencil sketch he labels "First Thought" to another with a grid sketched over it to help enlarge it in the next stage to a water color of a rock that wasn't actually used in the final version -- we are in his head, as Veronica Wyeth says.

Another artist in Wyeth's head produced a set of photographs commissioned by the CAM and imbedded in the exhibition. These works show, in a manner as personal and medium-conscious as Wyeth's own, the Olson house as it now looks. San Francisco-based Linda Conner's pictures are "printed out," i.e. printed in daylight, in her garden actually, with sun doing the work on slow emulsion printing paper. She then tones the prints with gold chloride. Her subjects, like those of Wyeth, take on a mythic dimension.

To follow Wyeth's thinking behind myth-evocation, I recommend looking closely at the wall where four studies of blueberry boxes and a basket are hung together. They are in watercolor touched with tempera and pencil and scraped in the way the artist uses to suggest motion and slashes of sun. We can see him thinking out where he wants the basket in relation to the boxes, what he wants to emphasize, trying one thing and another. It's quite amazing.

My friend who liked the milk pail would be drawn to "Grain Bag," although my own pick is the quietly inconspicuous, undeniably virtuosic "Shell Beans Drying," in which light and air, rather than the beans, seem to me the actual subject.

Yes, Wyeth is still alive. He's 90. Yes, he still paints. What else would he do? Yes, the intellectuals are still out on his evaluation. And, no, he doesn't think it matters. Grade: A-