Biography of Andrew Wyeth 4
Childhood
Andrew Newell Wyeth was born on July 12, 1917, in rural Chadds Ford,
Pennsylvania. He was the youngest son of Caroline Borkius Wyeth and the
renowned artist and illustrator N.C. Wyeth. Continuing in the creative
footsteps of their father, four of the five Wyeth children became artists. As a
young child, Wyeth was prone to illness, and he contracted whooping cough.
Concerned for his fragile health, his parents decided to school him at home.
When Wyeth was three, the family began spending summers in Maine, where they
enjoyed nature and relished the intellectual and social stimulation of their
visiting guests. Exhibiting artistic promise at an early age, Andrew learned to
draw before he could read, and eventually he assisted in creating his father's
illustrations.
Largely confined because of his frail constitution, Wyeth read and
studied the poetry of Robert Frost and the writings of Henry David Thoreau,
cultivating a deep appreciation for nature. He also had a vivid imagination and
enjoyed dressing up and building narratives from the props and costumes his
father used for his illustrations. He became fascinated with death and the macabre
in his youth and was enthusiastic about theater, especially Shakespeare. As a
boy, he spent a year building a maquette theater, equipped with costumed dolls,
to stage Arthur Conan Doyle's play The White Company.
Early Training and Work
Wyeth received formal and rigorous art training from his father, a
stickler for perfection. In the spring of 1933, he had his first exhibition at
the Wilmington Society of the Fine Arts in Wilmington, DE. He was uninterested
in working with oils and instead chose watercolor as his preferred medium,
combining precise details with Impressionist light and movement.
These early works were brought to the attention of Robert Macbeth, a
prominent New York City art dealer, who organized Wyeth's first solo exhibition
at his gallery in 1937. After two days, all of the paintings had been sold. At
the young age of 20, Wyeth was gaining more recognition than many other
practicing artists of his time. He continued experimenting with watercolors and
began using a dry brush technique in which he squeezed most of the moisture and
pigment out of the brush before applying it to the paper. Building up layers in
this way, he was able to create richly complex effects. In the late 1930s, his
sister's husband, Peter Hurd introduced Wyeth to egg tempera that he would use
and master throughout his long career. Wyeth enjoyed studying art history and
was very fond of the Italian Renaissance,
Greek Antiquities, the Rococo, and the Romantics. Though he
was greatly influenced by other American painters, in particular, Winslow Homer
and Edward Hopper, Wyeth
maintained his own distinct style of realism.
Mature Period
Wyeth met his wife Betsy Merle James in the summer of 1939 in Maine. His
father was suspicious of his son marrying, as he feared that Betsy would
control his art practice and life. Other tensions arose between father and son,
as N.C. became competitive and slightly jealous of the recognition Andrew was
receiving for his paintings and began questioning his own illustration career,
regretting that he never became a fine artist. Despite awkward family tensions,
Andrew's love and admiration for his father never wavered, and he married Betsy
in May 1940. With N.C. looming over the festivities with a scowl, the wedding
day was somewhat lacking in affection. According to Betsy, not wanting to
displease his father, Wyeth remained aloof and distant throughout the day.
N.C.'s predictions, however, were accurate; Betsy did take on the roles of
business manager and curator for her husband. She was also responsible for
maintaining their Maine and Pennsylvania homesteads and raising their two sons,
Nicholas (b. 1943), and James Browning (Jamie, b. 1946).
Even with newborn children in the picture, Wyeth kept secluded in his
studio, painting as much as he could. Museum of Modern Art curator Dorothy
Miller included Wyeth's egg tempera works in her exhibition, Americans 1943:
American Realists and Magic Realists. Subsequently, he was labeled a
Magic Realist, as his depictions of mundane rural life and landscapes were
uniquely mesmerizing and mysterious. Since Wyeth had a passion for theatrical,
grotesque, and absurd subject matter, his work became more steeped in death and
darkness. The symbolism found in his paintings were interpreted as reactions to
current events in his own personal life and in the world at large. While his
paintings did maintain a sense of mystery and subtle symbolism, Wyeth was
insistent on capturing the essence of the landscape as faithfully as possible.
To this end, he gathered natural materials - chunks of hay, gourds, and
branches - from his surroundings in Chadds Ford and kept them next to his easel
in the studio for further observation.
In 1945, Wyeth's father was killed by a passing train while crossing
tracks near his home. The site of the accident, Kuerner's Hill, would become a
recurring setting of Andrew's paintings, beginning with Winter 1946.
After the horrific loss, Wyeth's depictions of landscapes became more somber in
color and mood, and the figures displayed more emotion than ever before. Wyeth
felt that his beloved father's passing allowed him to finally feel. He
began making portraits of people with whom he had developed relationships,
although one of his greatest regrets was not having the opportunity to paint a
portrait of his father.
One of his frequent and most famous portrait subjects was Anna Christina
Olson (1893 - 1968), a neighbor in Cushing, Maine, who he met through his wife
in 1939. Olson suffered from polio, a degenerative muscle disorder, leaving her
legs immobile. Choosing not to use a wheelchair, she was often seen crawling on
the ground to get from one place to another. Wyeth greatly admired her
ferocious independence and strength, and she became the inspiration for his
most famous painting, Christina's World (1948), which the Museum of
Modern Art acquired soon after it was painted.
Late period
While coming to grips with the brutal death and destruction of the
Second World War, Wyeth continued to paint imagery from his insular world.
Steeped in symbolism, a painting of a field or a pumpkin patch could hold
numerous stories and meanings that went well beyond their realistic depiction.
By the mid-1950s, Wyeth had earned much acclaim from museums, institutions, and
popular magazines such as Time, even earning an honorary doctorate from
Harvard University in 1956. With the rise of Pop Art, Minimalism, and institutional critiques,
however, he was seen by many critics as retrograde and out of touch with
contemporary culture. As art historian David Cateforis explains, Wyeth's
"harshest critics...called him a reactionary purveyor of easily consumed,
stickily sentimental illustrations of a rural past that never existed."
While some derided his sentimentality, Wyeth defied such criticism by
daringly exploring the sexuality of his subjects. After Christina Olson died in
1968, Wyeth turned to a new model, the young teenager, Siri Erickson, one of
his neighbours in Maine. For ten years he painted her clothed and unclothed,
and some, including his wife, began to question the nature of his relationship
with the young girl. In the late 1970s, he also painted an idealized,
homoerotic nude portrait of his neighbour Eric Standard as if he were
Botticelli's Venus emerging out of the field, which became an icon among
gay men in the 1980s when it was first shown.
But it was in 1986 when Wyeth's pursuit of his subject's sexuality
caused sensational headlines when it was revealed that he had secretly painted
over 240 paintings and sketches of Helga Testorf between 1971 and 1985. Testorf
was the nurse to Wyeth's Chadds Ford neighbour Karl Kuerner, who had become
terminally ill. Wyeth was instantly attracted to the married Testorf and felt
the need to paint her repeatedly and in secret. A close friendship developed
between the two, and despite the many rumors, they claimed to have never had an
affair. Wyeth spoke about the series, saying, "It was a love affair with
the burning love that I've always had toward the things I paint."
Though they were supposed to be kept private until after Helga's death,
the collection was purchased in 1986 by a wealthy publisher named Leonard E.B.
Andrews for $6 million and exhibited at the National Gallery of Art in
Washington in 1987 and seen in the pages of Time and Newsweek.
While many criticized the voyeuristic aspect of the exhibition as crass
sensationalism, most of the critics panned the painting, arguing that most of
them were uninspired, technically flawed, and simply uninteresting. Some
likened them, unfavorably, to the illustrations of Wyeth's father. A couple of
years later, Andrews sold the cache of paintings and drawings to a Japanese
collector for an incredible sum, which led some to speculate that he and Wyeth
concocted the entire sensational affair.
Despite the news splash of the Helga paintings Wyeth's art practice
remained incredibly private. He did not allow people to watch him creating his
work. At one point in an interview he said that "it would be like somebody
watching you have sex - painting is that personal to me.''
In an interview in 1990, Thomas Hoving, director of the Metropolitan
Museum, said that Wyeth, "[had] changed in one significant way, he [was]
now bathing his paintings with real light, what the French would call en
plein air." As Wyeth aged, his paintings matured, and his work could
even be interpreted as being abstract. Looking closely at objects in the
landscape, Wyeth addressed the subject in a deeper way that moved beyond the
strictures of realism.
Wyeth died peacefully in his sleep on January 16, 2009 in Chadds Ford.
At 91 years of age, he had developed a significant portfolio with thousands of
paintings and drawings. His wife, Betsy is still compiling the Catalogue
Raisonné of her husband's work.
The Legacy of Andrew Wyeth
During his lifetime and after, poster and print reproductions of Wyeth's
paintings could be found in countless homes and dorm rooms, as his paintings
sparked an emotional attraction to and nostalgia for the rural life he
represented. Wyeth's realism influenced a number of regional artists from Maine
and Pennsylvania and across the United States, but with the prominence of
abstraction and Conceptual Art,
however, many of these painters have not had much, if any, national
recognition.
In the decade since his death, scholars have re-evaluated Wyeth's
realism and his relation to abstraction and modernism, and his status as an
important artist has only grown. Wyeth inspired new generations of artists and
filmmakers alike. His youngest son, Jamie, paints realistic, eerie paintings,
many of which contain a strong homoerotic perspective. Photographer James
Welling and painter Peter Doig have found inspiration from Wyeth's work.
Cartoonist, Charles M. Schulz referenced some Wyeth scenes in his Peanuts
comics, while the iconic Christina's World remains a mainstay in popular
culture and cinema. A 2007 episode of The Simpsons displayed the iconic
field and more recently, artist Tim O'Brien painted Kelly Anne Conway checking
her phone with the White House in the distance.
With affection,
Ruben
