Andrew Wyeth

American painter

• Born: July 12, 1917
• Birthplace: Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania
• Died: January 16, 2009
• Place of death: Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania

Wyeth created a body of work that many consider to embody the essence of American representational art. His style as a mature artist was to substitute a simple, common gesture or moment as the defining element in achieving a picture’s expression the tilt of a head or the gust of wind blowing through torn curtains.

Early Life

Andrew Wyeth (WI-uth) and his four older siblings grew up in a family dominated by the dynamic personality of their father, Newell Convers Wyeth, one of America’s greatest illustrators, whose work included drawings for Scribner’s Illustrated Classics. The world of heroic, daring action that his father depicted for such epic tales as Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1881-1882) and Kidnapped (1886), James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans (1826), Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), and the anonymous Robin Hood’s Adventures (c. 1490) was very real to young Wyeth, who saw the paintings and props in his father’s studio and heard his father relate the stories again and again.

In the rural atmosphere of Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, the young Wyeths received most of their education from tutors and their father, who saw that his children had access to good music, literature, and all kinds of creative activities. Wyeth’s childhood was a mixture of fantasy and reality combined with the security of a warm, close-knit family in which children were encouraged to express themselves. His father believed that a successful life demanded total emotional involvement in both work and play.

Wyeth’s only art training came from his father. In his early teenage years, he began regular studies in his father’s studio along with other students that Newell occasionally accepted. Newell took an academician’s approach to teaching by stressing that the fundamentals of drawing and painting must be mastered before one was capable of individual interpretation. He required beginners to draw from plaster casts, still lifes, and landscapes to train the hand and eye before being allowed to work in oils. Always avoiding rules or formulas, Newell believed that artists must intimately and spiritually experience the people or things they paint to the extent that they almost become the subject of the painting. Wyeth said that his father was a great teacher because he made students feel things in their own way, giving them a curiosity about the quality and character of an object. Accordingly, throughout his career Wyeth made numerous pencil or watercolor sketches before attempting the finished painting of a subject.

In 1939, Wyeth met Betsy James while at the family summer house in Maine; he proposed to her after a week, and they married in 1940. They had two sons: Nicholas, who became an art dealer, and James, a painter and watercolorist.

Life’s Work

Wyeth’s relationship with his extroverted, famous father did not keep him from developing a distinctive personality and style of his own as an artist. More introverted and less gregarious than his father, he enjoyed solitary painting excursions. By the mid-1930’s, he had achieved public success with his exhibitions of watercolors, which revealed the influence of Winslow Homer; his first solo exhibition, at New York’s Macbeth Gallery in 1937, sold out on the second day. However, his serious career began with his discovery of tempera paint in the late 1930’s. Wyeth explained that he and his father took up the medium at the same time, but, even though they believed absolutely the same things, each went about it in a different way. Newell used tempera very much as he used oils; Wyeth, however, saw it as a way of controlling any latent tendencies toward expressionism (or “messiness,” as he said) that might appear in his work with watercolors or oils.

Significantly, although both artists wanted their works to allow viewers to experience the artists’ own feelings about their subjects, Newell’s methods were always more literary and they relied upon strong narrative. Wyeth, on the other hand, usually avoided his father’s literary description, preferring to rely upon color and perspective to set the mood. An early example of his success in this regard is Public Sale (1943), in which the cold, gray sky and the vastness of a landscape with only two buildings separated by an anonymous crowd, barren trees, and two men leaning against a truck combine with the plunging diagonal of a dirt road to effectively convey the idea of sadness and tragedy.

Wyeth said that the turning point in his life was his father’s accidental death in a car-train collision in 1945. Before that, he thought of himself as just a “clever watercolorist with lots of swish and swash.” After the accident, however, he felt he needed to prove himself, to live up to his father’s teachings. In the first tempera he painted after Newell’s death, Winter (1946), the emotion that Wyeth had always felt toward the landscape was stronger because he chose to depict a landscape he identified with his father. There is an autobiographical quality to this painting of a young boy, seemingly at a loss, running down a hill near the spot where Newell was killed.

As his style developed toward maturity, Wyeth, concerning himself with problems of conveying emotion and drama without resorting to his father’s use of narrative details, found that he could achieve the results he wanted by limiting the panorama of nature and closely focusing upon a few details. In Spring Freshet (1942), for example, he brings a section of a tree trunk growing on the bank of the river up close to the picture plane, foreshortens the distance between the tree and the water, and focuses on the swirling, rough textures of the tree’s bark. This technique, which he often used throughout his career (Spring Beauty and The Hunter, 1943; Northern Point, 1950; The Pantry and Thin Ice, 1969), is based upon the principle that a detail of nature, when it is examined microscopically and when its proportion is subtly altered, generates a kind of mysterious energy. As one writer stated, an isolated fragment of nature becomes a magical presence, and the ordinary seems to become extraordinary.

In the late 1940’s, Wyeth experimented briefly with another technique in which he made use of ghostly figures, dilapidated interiors, condensed and claustrophobic spaces, and almost supernatural lighting (Christmas Morning, 1943; Seed Corn, 1948; The Revenant, 1949). He was searching for a way to express a sensation of the infinite within the context of the commonplace, but he realized that perhaps he was overstating the drama in these works.

Many writers consider that Wyeth reached the high point of his early period with Wind from the Sea (1947), Karl (1948), and Christina’s World (1948). These three paintings represent the kind of resolution that occurs when an artist has found the elements of style that become a trademark. Wyeth combined an arid, explicit realism and a sparseness of compositional elements with oblique or unexpected viewpoints. Although Christina’s World is still tied to a more obvious drama or symbolism as the severely disabled young woman strains to crawl toward the house in the distance, Karl and Wind from the Sea substitute a gesture or a moment as the defining element in achieving the picture’s expression the tilt of Karl’s head or the gust of wind blowing through torn curtains. These simple, sometimes totally unexpected moments and gestures became the most important stylistic feature of Wyeth’s mature style; Christina’s World, moreover, came to be so widely familiar in popular culture as to be iconic of American realism at its most emotionally charged.

In 1950, Wyeth’s career indeed his life almost came to an end. He was diagnosed with an affliction of the bronchial tubes, bronchiectasis, and required surgery, which involved removing part of one lung. He nearly died in the course of it, and afterwards the damage to muscles resulting from the operation made it unclear for a time if he would regain the dexterity to paint. During the weeks of recovery he meditated at length on the experience. The attraction to objects that broadly symbolize the passage of time and the transitory nature of life became a signature of his mature style. The theme of death and decay was made apparent in pictures of dried vegetation, dead birds, and decrepit buildings. Later, he substituted cracked walls, torn curtains, worn clothing, and dented buckets as metaphors for the brevity of life. Consequently, he seemed to prefer the winter and fall as seasons for his paintings; as he commented, during these seasons one feels the bone structures, the loneliness, and the dead feeling in the landscape. Specifically, his subjects usually are the landscape and people of Chadds Ford, or his summer house in Cushing, Maine.

Although Wyeth was often thought of as the portraitist of the average American, he never considered himself to be a portraitist of any kind and rarely accepted a portrait commission. His reasons for choosing the people he painted were complicated and had to do with his being drawn for his own private reasons to certain kinds of personalities, physiognomies, and situations. For example, beginning in 1948, Wyeth painted Anna and Karl Kuerner and their farm near his home repeatedly over the following thirty years.

His most famous subject, however, was Helga Testorf, a German-born neighbor. Testorf sat secretly as his model from 1971 until 1985 as he produced 246 tempura paintings, watercolors, and pencil studies. When the series of portraits of her was exhibited at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., in 1987, it created a sensation among the public and critics alike. It also took Wyeth’s wife and Testorf’s husband by surprise. In 2002, Wyeth painted Testorf one more time, a composition entitled Gone.

Most major American art galleries own art by Wyeth, and his exhibitions regularly set attendance records. Additionally, President John F. Kennedy presented him with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1963, the first artist to receive it, and President Richard M. Nixon sponsored an exhibition of his work at the White House in 1970. Wyeth became a member of France’s Académie des Beaux-Arts in 1977 and in 1980 the first living American to exhibit at England’s Royal Academy of Arts. Bates College in Maine granted him a doctor of fine arts degree in 1987, and the U.S. Congress bestowed on him the Congressional Gold Medal, its highest civilian honor, in 1990 also the first time for an artist. The medal showed a profile of Wyeth taken from a portrait by his son, Jamie.

Permanent collections of Wyeth’s artworks are maintained at the Brandywine River Museum in Chadds Ford, the Garnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, Maine, and the Greenville County Museum of Art in Greenville, South Carolina.

Significance

Wyeth’s art cannot be simply defined by referring to any one theme or stylistic device, although many consider his work to be realist to some extent. There are a number of thematic series to be found in his body of work, although these have never been fully recognized by most critics. Many times throughout his career, he returned to explicate the same person, scene, or idea, thus creating a situation in which viewers must look at more than just a single work to fully grasp Wyeth’s intent and meaning.

Wyeth’s great popularity as an artist was partly responsible for the many inaccurate labels that have been attached to him. In the 1950’s and 1960’s, some critics characterized him as a kind of dinosaur, the last exponent of nineteenth century realism in an art world ruled by abstract expressionism, while others claimed that he was only a self-appointed interpreter of rural America. Still others have dismissed him as a mere illustrator. In fact, in a remark that summed up Wyeth’s polarizing repute, art critic Robert Rosenblum called Wyeth both the most overrated and most underrated of American artists. Wyeth himself was well aware that placing a label on his work would be difficult, if not impossible, explaining with good humor, “I’m so conservative I’m radical.” Most scholars now acknowledge the futility of trying to pigeonhole every artist and recognize that even though Wyeth’s art is essentially representational, it does not simplistically fit into the category of realism.

The most enlightened view of Wyeth’s art is that it may be far more accurate to see his individualized, unique preoccupation with his own circumscribed surroundings as an exploitation of a psychic universe rather than a physical one. Thin Ice is an example of just such a psychic universe, with its juxtaposition of the opposites of light and dark, solid and void, surface and depth, life and death. Viewers look through the ice but are then forced to confront their own subconscious feelings or fears. Wyeth’s own words are, however, the best summation of his art. He said that emotion was his bulwark. In the end, that is the only thing that endures.

Bibliography

Adams, Henry. “Wyeth’s World.” Smithsonian, June, 2006. This enjoyable, informative review of Wyeth’s artistic career and life reveals much about his character and methods of painting, written upon the occasion of an exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Corn, Wanda M. The Art of Andrew Wyeth. Greenwich, Conn.: New York Graphic Society, 1973. A complete and insightful analysis of Wyeth’s work that considers his development from his early training in his father’s studio to his mature period. The book is well-illustrated with examples of Wyeth’s work and interesting family photographs and also contains a chronology of exhibitions and an extensive bibliography.

Hoving, Thomas. Two Worlds of Andrew Wyeth. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1978. This book contains a penetrating, in-depth interview with Wyeth by Hoving, who was the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art on the occasion of a Wyeth exhibition there. Profusely illustrated.

Knutson, Anne, et al. Andrew Wyeth: Memory and Magic. New York: Rizzoli, 2005. Contains essays reassessing Wyeth’s art chronologically and thematically. Includes 150 paintings and 50 drawings, with some by artists influenced by Wyeth.

Logsdon, Gene. Wyeth People. New York: Doubleday, 1971. Logsdon provides a different approach to the consideration of the artist and his work by exploring the Brandywine Valley and Chadds Ford and interviewing Wyeth’s friends and neighbors. Illustrated with a few black-and-white photographs of the people and places.

McCord, David, and Frederick A. Sweet. Andrew Wyeth. Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1970. This is a catalog of the works that Wyeth completed in Chadds Ford and Cushing, Maine. Includes an introductory essay, and color and black-and-white illustrations.

Meryman, Richard. Andrew Wyeth: A Secret Life. New York: Harper Collins, 1996. A family friend, Meryman presents a full-scale biography of Wyeth but also discusses his father, Newell, and his son, Jamie. The subtitle refers to the covert series of paintings about Helga Testorf. Includes many reproductions of paintings and photographs.

Severens, Martha. Andrew Wyeth, America’s Painter. New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1996. This catalog of a 1996 Wyeth exhibition at the Greenville County Museum in South Carolina contains an informative essay on Wyeth’s work by the museum’s curator and many excellent color plates of Wyeth’s work from 1988 through 1994.

Venn, Beth, and Adam D. Weinberg. Unknown Terrain: The Landscapes of Andrew Wyeth. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1998. An exhibition book featuring many of Wyeth’s best-known landscapes as well as unknown watercolors, accompanied by essays, including one by cultural historian Michael Kammen, discussing Wyeth’s ambiguous status in the world of American art.

Wyeth, Andrew, and Betsy James Wyeth. Andrew Wyeth: Close Friends. Jackson: Mississippi Museum of Art, 2001. With an introduction written by Wyeth’s wife, Betsy, this book offers 125 color reproductions of his paintings, watercolors, and drawings of their African American friends in their hometown of Chadds Ford.