Visitors to Washington's National Gallery of Art's "Andrew Wyeth: Looking Out, Looking In" are greeted by a masterpiece, the artist's 1947 , which structures the whole exhibition. The theme is windows, their recurrence as icon in the painter's oeuvre, their personal and sometimes hermetic meanings as metaphor, and the larger tension they set up between representation and abstraction in the some 60 paintings, watercolours and drawings on view.

Critics have been hating on Wyeth, who died in 2009, for at least a half-century and much of the venom was fuelled by art-world ideology. Wyeth committed at least two unpardonable sins, hewing to a realist style during an age of abstraction and irony, and achieving extraordinary popular success. One detractor dubbed him "our greatest living 'kitsch-meister'."

makes it impossible to accept those reflexive judgments, but taken together with the other works in this show, it doesn't make it much easier to love Wyeth's body of work.

Admire? Absolutely. But the art remains emotionally and often visually monochromatic, even monomaniacal. Wyeth gives us window after window - meticulous and virtuoso renderings - and yet the exhibition feels claustrophobic.

was painted in the ramshackle, 18th-century house of Christina and Alvaro Olson, siblings and friends of Wyeth's who lived on the coast of Maine. Wyeth was in a third-floor room, looking out to the sea, when the wind rustled the tattered curtain. Crocheted birds on the lacy fabric were caught momentarily in flight, and the painting is uncanny in its evocation of a numinous, fleeting instant of motion. Wyeth made a quick sketch, on the sheet of paper on which he had been drawing Christina Olson.

Olson, who was disabled by polio, was a friend of Wyeth's wife. She is mentioned in the title of Wyeth's most celebrated work, , which depicts a thin woman lying on parched grass, looking up a low rise to an old farmhouse. Wyeth admired her strength and she became a frequent subject, or inspiration of his work.

"You see before you the power of the queen of Sweden sitting there," he once said of Olson. Wyeth also said that , which is devoid of any tangible human presence, was a portrait of the stoic, dignified woman.

The exhibition's curators emphasise the degree to which Wyeth is engaged with abstraction throughout these works on show. Wood, walls, grass, cracked plaster, rumpled bed linens, distant hills and patches of sky are all rendered with great freedom. But it is always contained and often it is the geometry of the window that seems to keep it at bay.

This limited flirtation with messy gestures and abstract dynamism is rather like the use of atonality in Hollywood soundtracks, for dramatic effect and colour, but not integral to the larger purpose of the work. And while Wyeth can be rather daring in these little sallies outside of the representational comfort zone, there are some rules he will never break.

Take light and shadow: no matter how far he pushes ideas, no matter how much he bends the rules, he never forgoes a strict treatment of the play of light and shadow in these rooms, and across the forms contained therein. Illumination, so often the thrill of his greatest paintings, begins to feel like an obsession, or entrapment, as you see more and more of his lesser works.

The exhibition is designed to drive the viewer deeper into Wyeth's technique, his variations and elaboration of recurring themes and subjects. But the cumulative reductionism of his work, the austerity of its dun-coloured palette, dulls the mind more than it sharpens the eye.

Wyeth, who banished modernity and people from these paintings, drives you away from his work, and leaves you feeling entirely shut into the gallery space and shut out of his life. There is a masterpiece here, but it remains as cold and isolated as the Maine coast where it was made.

This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as: Windows on Wyeth reveal much to admire, little to love

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7tK%2FMqWWcp51kuaqyxKyrsqSVZK6zwNJmmq6kpKq%2FpnvAq6uim5yafHKBlG9oa2xfrLavsM6wZK2glaKypXnAp5urnadixLqx06FknrCYnq%2BqwMiopWaqlauyorjSZqSum5hirqW5yKuc