When “Wind from the Sea,” a 1947 painting by Andrew Wyeth, entered the collection of the National Gallery of Art in 2009, the museum wasted no time in building a show around it. Mounted just ...

Visitors to the National Gallery of Art's "Andrew Wyeth: Looking Out, Looking In" are greeted by a masterpiece, the artist's 1947 "Wind from the Sea," which structures the whole exhibition.

Wyeth painted real things, real people. He was not always great. But amid the abstract and minimalist drone that dominates most museum collections of postwar art ... wind-lashed blades of sea ...