Andrew Wyeth

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Born: 1917

Died: 2009

Summary of Andrew Wyeth

Paintings by Andrew Wyeth, one of America’s most celebrated 20th-century realists, evoke a sense of the ethereal mystery of the natural world, and therefore challenge prevailing conceptions of reality. When painting, Wyeth used watercolour and tempera instead of the more common oils or acrylics to capture the fine details of his surroundings in rural Pennsylvania, Maine, and other parts of New England. Despite his reputation as a realism painter, Wyeth’s compositions often have an air of the bizarre, leading some reviewers to dub him a Magic Realist. While Wyeth’s work was well-liked by the general public and the academic community for a while, his reputation began to tarnish in the 1960s as some critics said that his paintings were out of step with the times and did not speak to a changing society. Wyeth was adamant on painting the country life he was familiar with and refused to adapt his technique to suit the times. Later, Wyeth became a household name in the United States and a role model for younger artists returning to realism in order to explore contemporary social problems.

Because of Wyeth’s careful attention to detail, his Realism wasn’t just an account of life as it was documented. As an example, his compositions often used skewed angles and perspectives to give the impression that the subjects were odd or eerie in some way. Some reviewers dubbed Magic Realism a kind of Realism because of the odd perspective and meticulously controlled brushstrokes, which are the exact opposite of expressionistic. By contrast, Wyeth’s Magic Realism shows the material world as permeated with mystery and uncertainty rather than fantastical subjects.

Using watercolour and egg tempera, Wyeth experimented with new techniques such as the dry brush method, which he compared to weaving, to create textured surfaces on canvas. These “woven” textures give his subjects a sense of stillness and a dreamlike feel.

Wyeth, despite his rural and secluded upbringing in Pennsylvania and Maine, remained well-versed in contemporary art, and while some critics dismissed his work as a sentimental depiction of rural life, many of his paintings could be considered quite radical in their exploration of the innate sexuality of their subjects, such as the young Siri Erickson and older Helga Testorf, as well as his young neighbour Eric Standard, all of whom he painted completely nude.

Biography of Andrew Wyeth

Childhood

The young Andrew Newell Wyeth was born on the 12th of July, 1917, in the little Pennsylvania town of Chadds Ford. He was Caroline Borkius Wyeth’s only child, and the grandson of famed illustrator and artist N.C. Wyeth. Four of the five Wyeth children went on to pursue careers in the arts, following in their father’s footsteps. During his childhood, Wyeth was often sick and caught whooping cough. His parents chose homeschooling for him because of his weakened state. When Wyeth was three, his family started spending their summers in Maine, where they could enjoy the outdoors while also benefiting from the intellectual and social stimulation provided by their visitors. Andrew, who showed early potential as an artist, began to sketch before he could read and ultimately helped his father create the pictures for their books.

With limited mobility due to his weak health, Wyeth immersed himself in the poetry of Robert Frost and the essays of Henry David Thoreau, developing a profound love of the natural world. He also had a strong imagination and loved playing up in the clothes and accessories his father used in his drawings and creating stories around them. In his childhood, he developed a fascination with death and the macabre and grew enamoured with theatre, particularly Shakespeare. To perform Arthur Conan Doyle’s play The White Company, he spent a year as a child constructing a maquette theatre complete with dressed dolls that he built himself.

Early Life

Wyeth was raised by a perfectionist artist and got formal art instruction from his father. He held his debut show at the Wilmington Society of Fine Arts in Wilmington, DE, in the spring of 1933. His favourite medium was watercolour, which he preferred over oils because it allowed him to include both Impressionist light and movement into his work.

In 1937, Robert Macbeth, a renowned New York City art dealer, staged Wyeth’s first solo show at his gallery in response to these early paintings. All of the artwork had been sold in only two days. Wyeth’s fame grew quickly, and by the time he was 20, he had surpassed that of many other young painters in his field. With watercolours still in his arsenal, he tried out new techniques including the dry brush method, where he squeezed out as much moisture and pigment from the brush as possible before using it to paint the paper. Layering effects in this manner allowed him to get stunningly intricate results. Peter Hurd, the husband of Wyeth’s sister, introduced him to egg tempera in the late 1930s, and he used it and mastered it for the rest of his life. When it came to aesthetics, Wyeth was a big fan of Italian Renaissance art as well as Greek and Roman antiquities, as well as the Rococo. Though other American artists like Winslow Homer and Edward Hopper inspired him immensely, Wyeth remained true to his own kind of realism.

Mid LIfe

Wyeth was in Maine for the summer of 1939 when he met his future wife, Betsy Merle James. Afraid Betsy would take over his son’s creative profession and personal life, his father was sceptical of the marriage. When Andrew started getting attention for his paintings, his father was envious and began doubting his own illustration career, lamenting that he had never been a great artist. This caused friction between the two of them. Despite the awkwardness of the family dynamics, Andrew’s love and respect for his father never wavered, and he married Betsy in May of 1940 as a result of it. The wedding day lacked warmth as North Carolina scowled over the festivities. Wyeth, according to Betsy, was distant and aloof throughout the day because he didn’t want to offend his father. Betsy did take up the duties of business manager and curator for her husband, as N.C. had predicted. She was also in charge of looking after their Maine and Pennsylvania estates, as well as raising their two boys, Nicholas (b. 1943) and James Browning (b. 1945). (Jamie, b. 1946).

Wyeth remained isolated in his studio, painting as much as he could despite the presence of newborn children. American 1943: American Realists and Magic Realists, curated by Dorothy Miller of the Museum of Modern Art, included egg tempera paintings by Andrew Wyeth. As a result, he was dubbed a Magic Realist because of his captivating and enigmatic portrayals of everyday rural life and landscapes. Wyeth’s art grew more morbid as he developed an interest in dramatic, grotesque, and ridiculous subject matter. His paintings’ use of symbolism was understood as a response to events in his personal life and in the wider world. When it came to the subject matter of his paintings, Wyeth prioritised portraying the spirit of the environment above everything else. To this purpose, he collected natural objects from his surroundings in Chadds Ford, such as hay bales, gourds, and branches, and placed them next to his easel in the studio so he could observe them more closely.

Wyeth’s father was struck and killed by a train in 1945 as he crossed the lines near his house in New Jersey. Beginning with Winter 1946, Andrew’s paintings would use Kuerner’s Hill as a recurrent backdrop. After Wyeth’s tragic death, his landscape paintings took on a more melancholy colour palette and tone, while his portraits of people were more expressive than ever before. Wyeth had the impression that his father’s death had finally freed him to feel. As time went on, he painted pictures of the individuals with whom he had formed connections, but one of his biggest regrets was not being able to create a portrait of his father.

Anna Christina Olson (1893 – 1968), a neighbour in Cushing, Maine, who he met via his wife in 1939, was one of his most popular and well-known picture subjects. Olson’s legs were immobilised as a result of polio, a degenerative muscular disease. Because she refused to use a wheelchair, she was often seen crawling on the ground to move about. Because of Wyeth’s admiration, Christina’s World (1948), which the Museum of Modern Art bought shortly after it was painted, was inspired by her fierce independence and power.

Late Life

Wyeth painted images from his isolated environment even as he struggled with the horrors of World War II. When it comes to paintings of fields and pumpkin patches, the symbolism goes well beyond what is shown realistically. Museums, organisations, and publications like Time had all lauded Wyeth by the mid-1950s, and the artist had even been awarded an honorary doctorate from Harvard University that year. His work was derided by numerous reviewers for being out of date and regressive in the wake of the emergence of Pop Art, Minimalism, and institutional criticisms. “harshest critics…called him a reactionary purveyor of easily consumed, stickily sentimental illustrations of a rural past that never existed.” according to art historian David Cateforis.

Some criticised Wyeth for his sentimentality, but he challenged them by probing his subjects’ sexuality. After Christina Olson’s death in 1968, Wyeth began working with a new model, Siri Erickson, a teenage girl from Maine who lived next door. For 10 years, he painted her both dressed and bare, leading others, including his wife, to wonder about his feelings for the little girl. His homoerotic nude picture of his next-door neighbour Eric Standard, painted in the late 1970s as if the man were Botticelli’s Venus rising from the field, became an icon for homosexual men when it was first exhibited in the 1980s.

However, Wyeth’s obsession with Helga Testorf’s sexuality made news in 1986 when it was discovered that he had created over 240 paintings and drawings of her surreptitiously between 1971 and 1985, causing a scandal. Wyeth’s Chadds Ford neighbour Karl Kuerner, who had become sick and was near death, was cared for by Testorf, a nurse. Wyeth became enamoured with married Testorf right away and felt compelled to paint her frequently and covertly during her marriage. They became closer as time went on, and despite many reports to the contrary, they claimed to have never had a relationship. As Wyeth put it, the series was “It was a love affair with the burning love that I’ve always had toward the things I paint.”

A rich publisher named Leonard E.B. Andrews bought the collection in 1986 for $6 million and displayed it at the National Gallery of Art in Washington in 1987, where it was featured in the pages of Time and Newsweek despite the fact that it was intended to be kept secret until after Helga’s death. The voyeurism of the show was condemned by some as cheesy sensationalism, but most reviewers blasted the paintings, saying that most of them were uninspired, technically faulty, and just boring. Some compared them negatively to Wyeth’s father’s drawings. Many believed that Andrews and Wyeth had fabricated the whole spectacular storey since he sold the cache of artworks to a Japanese buyer two years later for a whopping amount of money!

The Helga paintings made a sensation in the media, but Wyeth’s creative technique was kept a secret. He didn’t want anybody to see him while he worked. It’d be like someone watching you having sex, he remarked in an interview. Painting is that intimate to me.

in a 1990 interview he stated 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.” Thomas Hoving, director of the Metropolitan Museum at the time Wyeth’s paintings became more mature as he got older, to the point where they might be considered abstract. Wyeth’s approach to landscape painting went beyond realism by looking carefully at the things in the scene.

On January 16, 2009, Wyeth passed away quietly in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. He was 91 when he died, but he left behind a sizable art collection that included thousands of paintings and sketches. Betty is continuing working on her husband’s work, creating a Catalogue Raisonné.

Wyeth’s paintings were ubiquitous in homes and dorm rooms during and after his death, since they generated a strong emotional connection to and longing for the rural life he depicted. Many regional artists from Maine and Pennsylvania, as well as other parts of the country, were inspired by Wyeth’s realism, but with the rise of abstraction and Conceptual Art, many of these painters have received little or no national acclaim.

Wyeth’s realism and relationship to abstraction and modernism have been re-evaluated by academics in the decade after his death, and his stature as a significant artist has only risen since then. Wyeth was a role model for upcoming artists and filmmakers. Jamie, his youngest son, is a realism painter who uses a strong homoerotic viewpoint in several of his works. Both James Welling, a photographer, and Peter Doig, a painter, were influenced by Wyeth’s work. Charles M. Schulz’s Peanuts comics included references to some Wyeth scenes, and Christina’s World has remained a cultural touchstone. The Simpsons featured the iconic field in a 2007 episode, and more recently, artist Tim O’Brien painted Kelly Anne Conway using her phone while the White House was visible in the background.

Famous Art by Andrew Wyeth

Winter Fields

1942

Wyeth depicts a dead crow in a wintery environment that has been hardened by rigour mortis. It’s as though the spectator has his or her face pushed to the ground, not far from the creature, instead of looking down on it as most people do. Nearby Wyeth’s neighbour is surrounded by fields that stretch as far as the eye can see; a farm home and some trees may be seen in the horizon. Its demise is made more tragic by the use of perspective, which gives the tiny animal a disproportionately large prominence in comparison to its surroundings.

Winter 1946

1946

A young guy is seen racing down a hill in haste in Winter 1946. In the top left of the picture, there is still some unmelted snow in the subdued hues. The viewer is left wondering who this boy is and where he’s going as he’s wrapped up warm in his winter gear.

Christina’s World

1948

Anna Christina Olson, the subject of Wyeth’s painting, stands with her back to the spectator, gazing out over her home in Cushing, Maine. Christina couldn’t walk because of a degenerative muscle condition. “limited physically but by no means spiritually” Wyeth stated of the woman who was “the challenge was to do justice to her extraordinary conquest of a life which most people would consider hopeless.” The thinness of her arms and legs, as well as her frail frame, give the impression that the figure is vulnerable and alone in the vast field. The viewer is in an awkward position because they are viewing her from behind. There is an air of fragility about the scenario, which adds to the overall sense of dread.

Trodden Weed

1951

Wyeth depicted a person strolling over an autumnal hill in this unique composition, but we can only see the person’s knees and the hem of his coat, which is billowing in the wind. The figure is wearing ancient, solid brown boots. Wyeth’s dry brush method renders the field’s grasses and weeds in stunning clarity and fine detail, as is customary for his work. Albrecht Dürer’s observations of nature, in particular tufts of grass, inspired him much. He frequently compared tempera paint to the soil. It seems as if the horizon is abnormally high, and the only visible sky is in the top right corner.

Master Bedroom

1965

Wyeth depicts Rattler, the family dog, sleeping soundly on a four-poster bed in the Master Bedroom. “come home tired one evening, wanting to take a nap, only to find Rattler had got there first.” Wyeth’s granddaughter Victoria recalled her grandfather saying in an interview. She then quoted Wyeth, saying, “You have to admit, dogs are the most adorable creatures ever. They just seize control of the property.” In spite of the title implying that we are in the owner’s bedroom, it is also a subtle reference to the dog, who is really the true master of the house.

Barracoon

1976

Barracoon depicts a naked black lady lying face-down on a bed draped in white sheets, her back to the spectator. Her elbows are bent as she rests her arms in front of her, palms up. In this case, Wyeth’s interpretation of the classic odalisque is the focus of the artwork. Whether by Titian or Manet, the naked woman is transformed into a sexual object of desire. Paul Gauguin’s divan paintings of young, dark-skinned Tahitian ladies are another source of inspiration. There’s a lot of sexual tension in Wyeth’s composition as well, but instead of painting the figure in a rich exotic environment as in Master Bedroom, Wyeth used expressive strokes and scratches on the walls to create an abstract backdrop. Because there are no other distractions in this abstract environment, one’s voyeuristic stare on a naked female body is heightened.

Overflow

1978

Helga Testorf, the model featured in Overflow, is seen lying on her side with a thin white sheet covering her breasts and genital region partly. Her pigtails fall over her breasts and left arm, while her right arm rests on the cushion over her head. She seems to be nearly smiling with her eyes closed, which is unusual in a Helga picture. Warm summer air drifts in through the open window as the setting sun softly illuminates her from behind. The voyeurism in this image shows the artist’s intense focus. The title may be a reference to the model’s exposure to too much light, or it could be a reference to the artist’s love for her company.

BULLET POINTED (SUMMARISED)

Best for Students and a Huge Time Saver

• Paintings by Andrew Wyeth, one of America’s most celebrated 20th-century realists, evoke a sense of the ethereal mystery of the natural world, and therefore challenge prevailing conceptions of reality.
• When painting, Wyeth used watercolour and tempera instead of the more common oils or acrylics to capture the fine details of his surroundings in rural Pennsylvania, Maine, and other parts of New England.
• Despite his reputation as a realism painter, Wyeth’s compositions often have an air of the bizarre, leading some reviewers to dub him a Magic Realist.
• While Wyeth’s work was well-liked by the general public and the academic community for a while, his reputation began to tarnish in the 1960s as some critics said that his paintings were out of step with the times and did not speak to a changing society.
• Wyeth was adamant on painting the country life he was familiar with and refused to adapt his technique to suit the times.
• Later, Wyeth became a household name in the United States and a role model for younger artists returning to realism in order to explore contemporary social problems.
• Because of Wyeth’s careful attention to detail, his Realism wasn’t just an account of life as it was documented.
• As an example, his compositions often used skewed angles and perspectives to give the impression that the subjects were odd or eerie in some way.
• Some reviewers dubbed Magic Realism a kind of Realism because of the odd perspective and meticulously controlled brushstrokes, which are the exact opposite of expressionistic.
• By contrast, Wyeth’s Magic Realism shows the material world as permeated with mystery and uncertainty rather than fantastical subjects.
• Using watercolour and egg tempera, Wyeth experimented with new techniques such as the dry brush method, which he compared to weaving, to create textured surfaces on canvas.
• These “woven” textures give his subjects a sense of stillness and a dreamlike feel.
• Wyeth, despite his rural and secluded upbringing in Pennsylvania and Maine, remained well-versed in contemporary art, and while some critics dismissed his work as a sentimental depiction of rural life, many of his paintings could be considered quite radical in their exploration of the innate sexuality of their subjects, such as the young Siri Erickson and older Helga Testorf, as well as his young neighbour Eric Standard, all of whom he painted completely nude.

Information Citations

En.wikipedia.org, https://en.wikipedia.org/.

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