Andrew Wyeth 1
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.
Hard work |
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
Pensylvania |
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
Sea intimidation |
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.
Nogeesh |
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
Nicolas |
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.
Far away |
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
Storm |
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.
Editors'note: Some subjetives pictures names were added by me to help edition
With affection,
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