Wyeth, Andrew (1917—)
The Realist painter Andrew Wyeth was born the youngest of five children to the successful artist/illustrator, N.C. Wyeth, in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania in 1917. He learned to paint with the keen observation and the drafting skills that his father passed on to him. His subjects, mainly nostalgic images of unpainted houses, austere New Englanders, and landscapes from his surroundings, have been enormously popular since his first sold out one-man show in New York in 1937. Like his father, he was offered the opportunity to paint covers for The Saturday Evening Post, but unlike his father, he declined, preferring to pursue a free interpretative course in his art. Ironically, because of his ability to capture on canvas the American sense of courage and its triumph over the struggles and trials of life, Andrew Wyeth was the first artist to be featured on the cover of Time magazine.
Nearly all of Wyeth's paintings are either executed in drybrush, watercolor, or egg tempera, a technique that allows for extreme precision. His subdued earth-colors palette, realistic style, and subject matter have remained the same throughout his career, often featuring a neighbor's farm in Chadds Ford and landscape scenes from his summers in Cushing, Maine. In the 1960s, he began to paint portraits of his sister, Carolyn, which encouraged him eventually to embark on a series of nudes of Helga Testorf, one of his Chadds Ford neighbors. An early Wyeth model, Christina Olson, was the subject of several of his portraits and one of his most famous paintings, Christina's World (1948). The painting shows the crippled woman gazing back towards her house from a windswept, grassy pasture. As an egg tempera work painted shortly after his father's tragic railway accident, it emphasizes the somber introspection and sense of struggle for which Wyeth gained a great deal of notoriety. The Olson House, featured in Christina's World, is the first house listed in the National Historic Register of Places to become famous through being featured in a painting, thus attesting to the popularity of the artist's work.
During the years 1972-1986, Wyeth painted his popular "Helga" studies. These pictures were painted in secret and comprise 247 images of the artist's most mature works, featuring the same model in numerous environments and moods. A sense of moral dignity and courage is characteristic of the portraits in this series of paintings, which were exhibited at the National Gallery of Art in 1987 and were the first works by a living artist to be shown there. This came after Wyeth's 1976 honor of having been the first living American artist to be given a retrospective at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Imbuing his art with a sense of visual poetry, mysterious in its evocation of emotion, Andrew Wyeth's craft has developed independently of the modern and contemporary avant garde movements. His apolitical, somewhat sentimental nature and keen sense of tenacity in subjects, appeals to those who find beauty in the tangibly representational rather than the abstract. Wyeth, however, finds that there is a kind of abstract discipline in utilitarian subjects that he is able to capture in paint, rendering image in a realistic style that appears to reveal the truth to his viewers. In the late 1970s he said, with obvious affection for his Maine subjects, "[Maine] is to me almost like going to the surface of the moon. I feel things are just hanging on the surface and that it's all going to blow away." Andrew Wyeth became popular because he depicts traditional values and grassroots images. His exhibitions draw record-breaking crowds and command some of the highest prices paid for the works of living American artists.
Dodge's Ridge by Andrew Wyeth. Further Reading:
Duff, I.H., and others. An American Vision: Three Generations of Wyeth Art (exhibition catalog). Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, Brandywine River Museum, 1987.
Canaday, J. Works by Andrew Wyeth from the Holly and Arthur Magill Collection. Greenville, South Carolina, 1979.
Whittet, G. S. "Wyeth, Andrew." In Contemporary Artists. Chicago, St. James Press, 1989.
Wilmerding, John. Andrew Wyeth: The Helga Pictures. New York, H.N. Abrams, 1987.
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