Andrew Wyeth

Beloved by the general public, but much maligned by critics for being an illustrator, Andrew Wyeth (1917–2009) defies easy categorization. Although he declared, “I honestly consider myself an abstractionist,” his work is consistently representational. The subjects of Wyeth’s numerous drawings and paintings are familiar, and because of his earthy depictions of the landscape and his engaging portrayals of ordinary people, he has been called “America’s Painter.” Nevertheless, there is often an underlying mystery, called by his wife Betsy “wondrous strange,” that permeates his most memorable paintings. [1]

Part of Wyeth’s appeal is his dedication to two locales: the coast of Maine near Cushing, and Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, where he was born in 1917. He was the fifth child in an artistic family—two sisters were painters, a third a noted composer. Their father, the renowned illustrator N.C. Wyeth, dominated family life, often playing the piano loudly, dressing up as St. Nick, and reading from the adventure tales he was bringing to life through his art. Young Andrew was sickly as a child, so was tutored at home and allowed to roam freely around the hills and farms of Chadds Ford, a small village not far from Philadelphia. At age sixteen, he began art lessons with his father, his only instructor, who was described by his son as “a great teacher because he made you feel (and really) feel things in your own way.” [2]

Initially, with his father’s approval, Wyeth painted freely brushed watercolors, many rendered with bright dashes of blues and reds. In 1937, at the age of twenty, the aspiring artist sold out an exhibition of his watercolors at the prestigious Macbeth Gallery in New York. Watercolor remained a favored medium throughout his long and productive career. He loved its spontaneity and freshness, but believed it to be more than a medium for sketching. “I want to keep the quality of a watercolor done in twenty minutes but have all the solidity and texture of a painting.” [3]

Wyeth’s life and art took a dramatic turn when, in 1945, N.C. Wyeth was killed by an oncoming unscheduled freight train. The young painter lost not only his father but also his teacher, mentor, critic, and rudder. For the remainder of his life, Andrew Wyeth regretted that he had never done a portrait of his father, something he reckoned with in his paintings over and over again.

Despite his personal dilemmas, success came easily to Andrew Wyeth. In 1948, the Museum of Modern Art purchased Christina’s World, an iconic image of a crippled woman lying in a field straining toward her weather-beaten house in the distance. For the painting, Wyeth used tempera, an age-old medium that had egg yolk as its binder. Laborious to paint and done on a hard surface like Masonite, tempera conveys a certain firmness, one appropriate to Wyeth’s craggy subjects and stark landscapes.

Paintings by Wyeth sold well and entered museum collections but never managed to gain much appreciation in the New York art world, perhaps because the artist avoided ongoing representation by an agent or gallery there. In mid-career, and mid-life, he embarked on what was to become a controversial body of work: the Helga series, named for the German woman who nursed his neighbor Karl Kuerner. In secrecy from everyone—his wife, her husband—Wyeth depicted her indoors and out, clothed and nude, in pencil, watercolor, and tempera for over a decade. In 1986, when the collection came to light and was purchased, it created a sensation. Wyeth and his model gained great notoriety, and his career was reignited, culminating in an exhibition of the work at the National Gallery in Washington, the first exhibition there of a living artist.

In the last decades of his life, Wyeth garnered a tremendous following in the Far East, particularly in Japan, where exhibitions of his work generate great crowds. In addressing the topic “Wyeth’s World and the Japanese,” Shuji Takahashi has written: “Whether ancestor worship or nature worship, the Japanese believe that divine beings can inhabit any thing and any place, so that they consecrate as holy all manners of things and places rather than a limited number of specific, concrete forms.… In the world Andrew Wyeth depicts, we find interwoven the eternity of the world around us, its fierce nature included, and, at the same time, the transience and impermanence of individual humans and their actions.” [4] In addition to his following in Japan, Wyeth has touched the hearts of many in this country with his talent for compelling images, always painted with great facility.

Notes:

[1] Wyeth quoted in Richard Meryman, “Andrew Wyeth: An Interview,” in Wanda Corn, The Art of Andrew Wyeth (Boston: New York Graphic Society, published for the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 1973), 45; Martha R. Severens, America’s Painter (Greenville, SC: Greenville County Museum of Art, 1996); and Betsy James Wyeth, et al., Wondrous Strange: The Wyeth Tradition: Howard C. Pyle, N.C. Wyeth, Andrew Wyeth, James Wyeth (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1998).

[2] Wyeth quoted in Corn, The Art of Andrew Wyeth, 126.

[3] Wyeth quoted in E. P. Richardson, “Andrew Wyeth’s Painting Techniques,” in Corn, The Art of Andrew Wyeth, 85.

[4] Shuji Takahashi, “The Inner World of Andrew Wyeth," in Andrew Wyeth Retrospective (Nagoya, Japan: Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art, 1995), 258.