Andrew Wyeth

Andrew Newell Wyeth (born July 12, 1917) is an American realist painter, one of the best-known of the 20th century. He is sometimes referred to as the "Painter of the People" due to his popularity with the American public. 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. His most famous work, and 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 Wyeth is the son of Newell Convers Wyeth, a famous American illustrator and artist. The youngest of five children, Andrew Wyeth was home-tutored and learned art from his father. In 1937 at age twenty, Wyeth had his first one-man exhibition of watercolors at Macbeth Gallery in New York City. The entire inventory of paintings quickly sold out, and Wyeth's career was launched.

In 1940 Wyeth married Betsy Merle James, whom he had met the year before in Maine. Betsy introduced Wyeth to Christina Olson, who later became the subject of the painting Christina's World. Christina, her brother Alvaro and their weatherbeaten house became an important subject of Wyeth's art for over twenty years. Betsy James Wyeth has played a guiding and supportive role in Wyeth's art through his career.

Father's Death / 1940s

In 1945 Andrew Wyeth's father and his three-year-old nephew 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 a personal tragedy. It was shortly after this time that Wyeth's art consolidated into his mature and enduring style, characterized by a subdued color palette, highly 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. Like the Olsons in Maine, the Kuerners and their farm became one of Wyeth's most important subjects for nearly 30 years.

Mature Career

Dividing his time between Pennsylvania and Maine, Wyeth has maintained a relatively consistent realist painting style for over fifty years. He has tended to gravitate to several identifiable landscape subjects and models, to which he would return repeatedly over a period of decades. 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. His works have fetched increasingly higher prices with his growing fame, and today Wyeth's major works can sell for in excess of one million dollars from private dealers and at auction.

Critical Reaction

Wyeth's art has long been controversial. As a representational artist, Wyeth's paintings have sharply contrasted with the prevailing trend of abstraction that gained currency in American art in the middle of the 20th century. Museum exhibitibitions of Wyeth's work have set attendance records, but many art critics have derided his paintings. The most common criticisms are that Wyeth's art verges on illustration, and that his predominantly rural subject matter is heavily weighted with sentiment. 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 exceptionally skilled at handling the mediums of watercolor and egg tempera (which uses egg yolk as a medium). Except for early experimentations, Wyeth has avoided using traditional oil paints.

The Helga Paintings

A particularly controversial episode in Wyeth's career surrounded a body of work Wyeth painted of Helga Testorf, a model he met through the Kuerner family in Chadds Ford. Wyeth began painting Helga in 1971 and for nearly fifteen years she was one of Wyeth's most important models. Unlike his other subjects, however, Wyeth kept the vast majority of his Helga works a secret from everyone, including his wife Betsy. He revealed the Helga pictures to Betsy in 1985, and arranged a sale of the paintings to Leonard Andrews, a private investor, the following year. Andrews arranged a publicity blitz that attracted major museums to exhibit the artwork. Enticed by the suggestion of a secret love affair between Wyeth and Helga, national news media featured the story of Wyeth's secret cache of art. Following the museum exhibtions, Andrews sold the works to an anonymous Japanese industrialist in 1990 reportedly for a substantial profit. Some curators felt that their museums were used to enhance the value of the art prior to the sale. Some art critics thought that Wyeth and his wife had fabricated the entire story of the secret cache of paintings. Others simply admired the art. After the paintings' sale to the anonymous Japanese industrialist in 1990, the paintings were frequently exhibited at museums in the U.S. and Japan. The paintings were resold in early December, 2005 to an American buyer, who may break the collection up for individual sale.

Museum Collections

Andrew Wyeth is in the collection 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; and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the National Gallery of Art, in 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 Museum of Art in Rockland, Maine, and the Greenville County Museum of Art in Greenville, South Carolina. A major retrospective of Andrew Wyeth's work will be 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. In 1963, Andrew Wyeth became the first painter to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which was conferred by President John F. Kennedy. 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. In 1990, he was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal of Honor by President George H. W. Bush.

Trivia

Andrew Wyeth's brother, Nathaniel C. Wyeth, invented the plastic soda pop bottle.

Wyeth was used as a humorous device by cartoonist Charles M. Schulz in the comic strip Peanuts. The character Snoopy was a collector of fine art and had a Wyeth on display at a housewarming party that went "over big."

Andrew Wyeth's father is the renowned illustrator N.C. Wyeth, known for his illustrations for Treasure Island and Robinson Crusoe.

Tom Duffield, the production designer for the American remake of The Ring, drew inspiration from Wyeth's paintings for the look of the film.

Galleries online

External links

Smithsonian Magazine Article on Andrew Wyeth

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