Andrew Wyeth
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Andrew Newell Wyeth
(born July 12, 1917) is an American realist painter, also known
as regional art. 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.
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 during long periods
together. Both shared the same love for rural landscape, a sense
of romance, and a strongly held feeling for Wyeth family history
dating back to 1645 in America. Andrew started drawing at a very
young age, and with his father’s patient and skillful guidance,
he mastered figure study and early took to 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 quickly sold
out, and Wyeth's career was launched. His style was distinctly
different from his father’s—more spare, more ”dry”, and more
limited in color range. He also avoided the drama of his
father’s style and early on stated the belief that “the great
danger of the Pyle school is picture-making.” He went on to do a
little illustration in his early career, including illustrating
several books by the author Allen French, but avoiding the yoke
that had been held back N.C. Wyeth’s artistic freedom, Andrew
charted his own direction.
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 well-known 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 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. 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. Ironically,
the Kuerner's farm is just a few yards from the railroad tracks
where N.C. Wyeth died. The Kuerner's 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”.
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. 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 refocused his artistic
attention upon Siri Erickson, capturing her naked innocence in
Indian Summer (1970). It was a prelude to the Helga paintings.
In 1986, extensive coverage was given to the revelation of a
series of 247 studies of Wyeth's neighbour, the Prussian-born
Helga Testorf, painted over the period 1971–1985 without the
knowledge of either Wyeth's wife or John Testorf, her 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.
