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Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009)
By Linda Martin, Customer Service Bibliographer
"Emotion is my bulwark. I think that's the only thing that endures, finally." Andrew Wyeth
Andrew Wyeth was born July 12, 1917 in Chadds Ford, PA, the youngest of illustrator N.C. Wyeth's five children. Unlike his siblings, he was not encouraged toward art until he was 15, when his creativity was finally noticed and encouraged by his father. However, due to childhood illness, he was home-schooled and as result witnessed in full the dynamic creativity of his father and the milieu of a successful turn-of-the-century artist.
Fearful that the "deft and flamboyant" technique of his early watercolors were facile and inclined toward illustration, in 1941 Wyeth studied the difficult egg tempera technique of his brother-in-law, artist Peter Hurd. Nothing could be more suited to slowing an artist down. The results were amplified by the restrained color, matte surface and painstaking drybrush technique he adopted.
"My aim is to escape from the medium with which I work. To leave no residue of technical mannerisms to stand between my expression and the observer. To seek freedom of so-called free and accidental brushwork . . . . Not to exhibit craft but rather to submerge it; and make it rightfully the hand-maiden of beauty, power and emotional content." Andrew Wyeth
Curiously, though his art was very different from his father's and considerably further from illustration, the abstract expressionists were moving forward with such success as to make his tightly painted landscapes of the stark country around Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania and Cushing, Maine vulnerable to dismissal. He became a poster boy for the endless argument about the prestige of art over illustration.
His work did continue his father's penchant for drama and emotion and it appealed to something in the American character that had reacted similarly to the poet Robert Frost. Perhaps a hardened nostalgia for a simpler world peopled with stronger stock. Perhaps it's that his mid-century paintings resonated with the zeitgeist of World War II, years of loss ending with the bitterness of having used the atom bomb.
In 1945 after his father and nephew died in a stalled car at a train crossing, Wyeth worked on a painting called Winter for many months. It is a portrait of a boy running aimlessly, eyes averted. Wyeth has said the hill is his father (the accident took place on the other side of this hill) and the boy ""was me, at a loss-that hand drifting in the air was my free soul, groping."
"I think anything like that - which is contemplative, silent, shows a person alone - people always feel is sad. Is it because we've lost the art of being alone?" Andrew Wyeth
There is a palpable silence one feels in the presence of many of his paintings and, in some, a distinct foreboding. It would be hard to deny the influence of his father's dark temperament and the Wyeth legacy of depression, suicide, death and secrecy, but so much has been made of his work as a vision of Gothic melancholy that a certain tenderness, patience and sensitivity to character tends to be overlooked.
It was typical of Wyeth to paint a figure repeatedly, capturing character in series so that a narrative, perhaps unintentionally, arose. In this way too, in an attraction to drama and story, he inherited his father's concerns. But his characters were not fictional, they were his neighbors and his family: Christina Olson, Siri Erickson, Helga Testorf and Karl and Anna Kuerner, his wife and children. The most famous was painted in 1945: the ubiquitous image of Christina Olson, crippled and alone in a field near her weather-beaten clapboard house in Maine.
Wyeth married Betsy James, daughter of a Maine newspaper editor, in 1940 and she became wife, model and a canny business partner. It is suspected that it is her feeling for commercial drama that offered up the irresistible story of Wyeth painting a frequently nude young model in secrecy for 15 years without his wife's knowledge. An artist could not ask for more media coverage than that provided by the genteel sensationalism of the 240 paintings of Helga Testorf.
"He would get totally involved in his work. It was as if you were a tree . . . . He's a normal, everyday person. He does paint good, but he's just Andy." Siri Erikson
Leonard Andrews, remembered by Christopher Knight of Time magazine ". . . as a savvy participant in one of the great media hoaxes about art in the last quarter century," was a beneficiary. After being approached by the Wyeths (Betsy being the business manager) Andrews bought the entire collection of Helga paintings-and the copyright to the images. Ten months after the barrage of publicity, Andrews sold some 200 items in the collection to an anonymous Japanese industrialist for an estimated $40- $50 million, the clever media blitz netting him a 600% profit. Bravo Betsy!
Wyeth's first commercial success began modestly in New York with a 1937 gallery exhibition when he was only 20. His first major exhibition was in 1951 at the Farnsworth Museum in Maine--a museum which maintains the Christina Olson House in which Wyeth had a studio. His work was exhibited in a dozen major museums between 1966 and 2006 and in 1987 the Helga paintings were the first "living artist" exhibition hosted by the National Gallery of Art. Permanent exhibits of his work can be seen in the Greenville County Museum of Art in South Carolina and at the Brandywine Museum in Chadds Ford.
Wyeth received many official honors. In 1963, he was the subject of a cover story for Time magazine and, thanks to President John F. Kennedy, he became the first visual artist to be nominated for the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 1977 he made his first trip to Europe, to be inducted into the French Academy of Fine Arts-the only American artist since John Singer Sargent to be admitted. In 1990, Wyeth received the Congressional Gold Medal, the first artist to have this honor. In 2007 he was presented the National Medal of the Arts.
Andrew Wyeth died in his sleep, Friday, January 16 at the age of 91, at home in Chadd's Ford, PA. He is survived by Betsy and his two sons, Nathanial and Jamie.
Below please find a list of books related to Andrew Wyeth. For your convenience, this list is also available in a MS Excel spreadsheet. click here.
ABANDONED NEW ENGLAND: LANDSCAPE IN THE WORKS OF HOMER, FROST, HOPPER, WYETH, AND BISHOP.
• AUTHOR: PATON, PRISCILLA
• PUBLISHER: UNIV PR OF NEW ENGLAND
• CONTENT LEVEL: ADV-AC
• LC CLASS: NX653.N48P37 2003
• $26.00 CLOTH (282 P.)
• ISBN-13: 9781584653134
• B&T YBP
ALL IN A DAY'S WORK...FROM HERITAGE TO ARTIST.
• AUTHOR: KUERNER, KARL J.
• PUBLISHER: CEDAR TREE BOOKS
• CONTENT LEVEL:
• LC CLASS: ND237.K758 A4 2007
• $49.95 CLOTH (117 P.)
• ISBN-13: 9781892142320
• B&T YBP
AMERICAN VISION; THREE GENERATIONS OF WYETH ART, N.C. WYETH, ANDREW WYETH, JAMES WYETH
• AUTHOR: DUFF, JAMES H.
• PUBLISHER: LITTLE, BROWN & CO
• CONTENT LEVEL:
• LC CLASS: ND237.W94 A4 1987
• $35.00 PAPER (209 P.)
• ISBN-13: 9780821216569
• B&T YBP
ANDREW WYETH: A SECRET LIFE.
• AUTHOR: MERYMAN, RICHARD
• PUBLISHER: HARPERCOLLINS
• CONTENT LEVEL:
• LC CLASS: ND237.W93 M4 1996
• $21.95 PAPER (447 P.)
• ISBN-13: 9780060929213
• B&T YBP
ANDREW WYETH: AUTOBIOGRAPHY.
• AUTHOR: WYETH, ANDREW
• PUBLISHER: BULFINCH
• CONTENT LEVEL: GEN-AC
• LC CLASS: ND237.W93A2 1995
• $29.95 CLOTH (176 P.)
• ISBN-13: 9780821225691
• B&T YBP
ANDREW WYETH: MASTER DRAWINGS FROM THE ARTIST'S COLLECTION.
• AUTHOR: ADAMS, HENRY, 1949-
• PUBLISHER: BRANDYWINE RIVER MUSEUM
• CONTENT LEVEL: GEN-AC
• LC CLASS: NC139.W9A4 2006
• $29.95 PAPER (108 P.)
• ISBN-13: 9780295986159
• B&T YBP
ANDREW WYETH: MEMORY & MAGIC.
• AUTHOR: KNUTSON, ANNE CLASSEN
• PUBLISHER: PHILADELPHIA MUSEUM ART
• CONTENT LEVEL: GEN-AC
• LC CLASS: ND237.W93A4 2005
• $49.95 CLOTH (223 P.)
• ISBN-13: 9780847827718
• B&T YBP
WYETH PEOPLE.
• AUTHOR: LOGSDON, GENE
• PUBLISHER: SWALLOW OHIO UNIV PRESS
• CONTENT LEVEL: GEN-AC
• LC CLASS: ND237.W93L6 2003
• $16.95 PAPER (142 P.)
• ISBN-13: 9780804010627
• B&T YBP
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