Andrew Wyeth

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Andrew Wyeth

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Andrew Newell Wyeth (born July 12, 1917) is an American realist painter, and regionalist artist. He is one of the best-known of the 20th century and sometimes referred to as the "Painter of the People" due to his popularity with the American public. He is the son of the illustrator and artist N. C. Wyeth, and the brother of inventor Nathaniel Wyeth and artist Henriette Wyeth Hurd, and the father of artist Jamie Wyeth and Nicholas Wyeth .

Wyeth's favorite subject is the land and inhabitants around his hometown of Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania and those near his summer home in Cushing, Maine. One of the most well-known images in 20th century American art, is Christina's World (1948), in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

Childhood/Early career

Andrew was the youngest of the five children of N. C. and Carolyn Bockius Wyeth. He was home-tutored because of his frail health, and learned art from his father. Both shared a love for rural landscape, a sense of romance, and a feeling for Wyeth family history. Andrew started drawing at a young age, and with his father’s guidance, he mastered figure study and watercolor, and later learned egg tempera from brother-in-law Peter Hurd. He studied art history on his own, admiring many masters of Renaissance and American painting, especially Winslow Homer. Like his father, he read and appreciated the poetry of Frost and Thoreau and studied their relationship with nature. Music and movies also heightened his artistic sensitivity.

In 1937 at age twenty, he had his first one-man exhibition of watercolors at Macbeth Gallery in New York City. The entire inventory of paintings sold out, and Wyeth's career was launched. His style was different from his father’s—more spare, more ”dry”, and more limited in color range. He stated his belief that “the great danger of the Pyle school is picture-making.” He did some book illustrations in his early career, but not to the extent that N.C. Wyeth did.

Father's death 1940s

In 1940, Wyeth married Betsy James and in 1943 the Wyeths had their first child Nicholas, followed by James ("Jamie") three years later. Andrew painted portraits of both Jamie and Betsy. In October 1945, Andrew Wyeth's father and his three-year-old nephew, Newell Convers Wyeth II (b. 1941), were killed when their car stalled on railroad tracks near their home and was struck by a train. Wyeth has referred to his father's death as a formative emotional event in his artistic career, in addition to being a personal tragedy. It was shortly after this that Wyeth's art consolidated into his mature and enduring style, characterized by a subdued color palette, realistic renderings, and the depiction of emotionally charged symbolic objects.

In 1948, Wyeth began painting Anna and Karl Kuerner, neighbors of the Wyeths in Chadds Ford. It was at the Olsen farm in 1948 that he painted Christina’s World, his famous image of crippled Christina Olsen yearning for her home. Like the Olsons in Maine, the Kuerners and their farm became one of Wyeth's most important subjects for nearly 30 years. The Kuerners' farm is now available to tour through the Brandywine River Museum as is the N.C. Wyeth home and studio.

Wyeth stated about the Kuerner Farm, “I didn’t think it a picturesque place. It just excited me, purely abstractly and purely emotionally”.

Mature career

Dividing his time between Pennsylvania and Maine, Wyeth has maintained a realist painting style for over fifty years. He gravitates to several identifiable landscape subjects and models. In 1958, Andrew and Betsy Wyeth purchased and restored “The Mill”, a group of 18th century buildings which appeared often in his work, including Night Sleeper (1979). His solitary walks are the primary means of inspiration for his landscapes. He develops an extraordinary intimacy with the land and sea and strives for a spiritual understanding based on history and unspoken emotion. He typically creates dozens of studies on a subject in pencil or loosely brushed watercolor before executing a finished painting, either in watercolor, drybrush (a watercolor style in which the water is squeezed from the brush), or egg tempera.

When Christina Olsen died in the winter of 1969, Wyeth re-focused his artistic attention upon Siri Erickson, capturing her naked innocence in Indian Summer (1970). It was a prelude to the Helga paintings.

Helga pictures

In 1986, extensive coverage was given to the revelation of a series of 247 studies of Wyeth's neighbor, the Prussian-born Helga Testorf, painted over the period 1971–1985 without the knowledge of either Wyeth's wife or John Testorf, Helga's husband. Helga is a musician, baker, and caregiver, and friend of the Wyeths. She met Wyeth when she was attending to Karl Kuerner. She had never modeled before but quickly became comfortable with the long periods of posing during which she was observed and painted in intimate detail. The Helga pictures are not an obvious psychological study of the subject but more of an extensive study of her physical landscape set within Wyeth's customary landscapes. She is nearly always unsmiling and passive, yet within those deliberate limitations, Wyeth manages to convey subtle qualities of character and mood, as he does in many of his best portraits. This extensive study of one subject studied in differing contexts and emotional states is unique in American art.

In 1986, millionaire Leonard E. B. Andrews purchased the entire collection, preserving it intact.

The works were exhibited at the National Gallery of Art in 1987, and in a coast-to-coast tour.The Helga works are now owned by a private Japanese interest, which has agreed to allow additional exhibitions. In March 2002, Wyeth painted Gone, his last Helga picture, and it joined the collection on recent tours between 2002-2006.

Critical reaction

Wyeth's art has long been controversial. As a representational artist, Wyeth's paintings have sharply contrasted with abstraction that gained currency in American art in the middle of the 20th century.

Museum exhibitions of Wyeth's paintings have set attendance records, but many art critics have been critical of his work. Peter Schjeldahl, art critic for The Village Voice, derided his paintings as "Formulaic stuff not very effective even as illustrational 'realism'". Common criticisms are that Wyeth's art verges on illustration, and that his rural subject matter is sentimental.

Admirers of Wyeth's art believe that his paintings, in addition to sometimes displaying overt beauty, contain strong emotional currents, symbolic content, and underlying abstraction. Most observers of Wyeth's art agree that he is skilled at handling the mediums of watercolor and egg tempera (which uses egg yolk as a medium). Wyeth has avoided using traditional oil paints. His use of light and shadow let the subjects illuminate the canvas. His paintings and titles suggest sound, as is implied in many paintings including Distant Thunder (1961) and Spring Fed (1967).

Museum collections

Andrew Wyeth is in the collections of most major American museums, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York City; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the National Gallery of Art; the Arkansas Art Center in Little Rock; and the White House, in Washington, DC. Especially large collections of Wyeth's art are in the Brandywine River Museum in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania; the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, Maine; and the Greenville County Museum of Art in Greenville, South Carolina. A major retrospective of Andrew Wyeth's work occurred at the Philadelphia Museum of Art

from March 29, 2006 - July 16, 2006.

Honors and awards

Wyeth has been the recipient of numerous honorary degrees. Most recently, Wyeth received the 2007 National Medal of Arts. In 1963, Andrew Wyeth became the first painter to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 1977, he became the first American artist since John Singer Sargent elected to the Académie des Beaux-Arts. In 1980, Wyeth became the first living American artist to be elected to Britain's Royal Academy. In 1987 Wyeth received a D.F.A. from Bates College. On November 9, 1988, Wyeth received the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest civilian honor bestowed by the United States legislature.

Influence on Pop Culture

Wyeth was often referenced by cartoonist Charles M. Schulz (a longtime admirer) in the comic strip Peanuts. In one strip the character Snoopy was presented with a bill for "psychiatric help" 20 cents and states "I refuse to sell my Andrew Wyeth". In another strip, Snoopy's prized Van Gogh painting is burned in a fire, and he replaces it with an Andrew Wyeth. Fred Rogers, from the PBS television series 'Mister Rogers' Neighborhood', had an Andrew Wyeth painting in the entry way of the studio home, readily seen as he entered and exited.

Tom Duffield, the production designer for the American remake of The Ring, drew inspiration from Wyeth's paintings for the look of the film. M. Night Shyamalan based his movie The Village on paintings by Andrew Wyeth. The Village was filmed in Chadds Ford not far from Wyeth's studio. Director Philip Ridley has stated that his 1990 film The Reflecting Skin is heavily inspired by the paintings of Andrew Wyeth in its visual style.