Collection: Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009)

Andrew Newell Wyeth
Born Pennsylvania, 1917

Andrew Wyeth's paintings may be the best-known works by an American artist. Even those not familiar with museums and their collections recognize his "Christina's World," a public favorite at New York's Museum of Modern Art. This work embodies Wyeth's signature style, which he sustained for over six decades amidst aesthetic trends. Rooted in a fine art tradition, this deft painter has earned admiration for his technical mastery, but it is his insight into emotional truth behind appearances that makes his images memorable.

Larger-than-life, Andrew's father, the illustrator N.C.Wyeth, nurtured young Andrew's active imagination and prompted an inward turn of character. In America's Golden Age of illustration, N.C.Wyeth's heroic pictorials for tales of history and adventure exemplified the expansive energy of the early 20th century. Earnings from his "Treasure Island" illustrations paid for the cherished Wyeth family home at Chadd's Ford Pennsylvania, the grounds of which provided the setting for the frail son's boyish quests.

With a faulty hip, Andrew was homeschooled, which allowed days of exploring the woods dressed in costume, playing with his ever-increasing armies of toy soldiers, and drawing. The outward vigor of the father assumed a more interiorized, watchful quality in the son, who both cherished and withdrew from his elder's command. Granting his son the freedom to express himself, N.C. only introduced formal art training in Andrew's teens. Then he provided two years of instruction that combined rigorous academic exercises with a Thoreau-inspired metaphysics of nature.

Spending time at the family home in Maine, Andrew came to know both Winslow Homer's art and the landscape and people that inspired it. Homer's scenes shared the robust masculinity of N.C.Wyeth but provided an alternative vision that was grounded in the ordinary and yet was less literal. Significantly, Homer and then Edward Hopper showed Wyeth the introvert the power of understatement. In moving away from his father's influence, the young artist developed a palette of muted tones and found refuge in the freedom of watercolor.

Wyeth had his New York art debut in 1937, with a show that sold out the second day. Fortified by this phenomenal success, he moved further from his father's sway by learning the early Renaissance technique of painting with tempera and egg yolk from N.C.'s friend, Peter Hurd. This technique has a quality that can isolate and intensify objects while making people more like objects, an aspect which Wyeth used for expressive effect. Like those artists such as Durer who inspired him, Wyeth developed a natural symbolism, in which the visible world can be understood through metaphor.

In 1940, he married Betsy James, who is credited with pushing Wyeth beyond an easy-chair realism. In the 40s and 50s, he was commonly connected to artists such Paul Cadmus and Ivan Albright, so that Elaine de Kooning referred to Wyeth as "master of the magic realist technique": "Wyeth, through his use of perspective can make a prosperous farmhouse kitchen or a rolling pasture as bleak and haunting as a train whistle in the night." Although Wyeth has always insisted that his art has to do with the subconscious, critical debate thrust him into the role of realist holdout. Yet even the Abstract Expressionist Mark Rothko recognized Wyeth's "pursuit of strangeness."

The major turning point in Wyeth's life was the unexpected death of his father, who was killed when his car was hit by a train in 1945 (eight years to the day of Andrew's artistic debut). From that point on, Wyeth's representations suggested absence or longing -- if only for the moment that had just passed. Drawing subjects from familiar rural settings, the artist freezes time in an individual or a collective memory. A simple stone house built in a bygone era is also the hearth that beckons us home. Wyeth's cinematic eye instills a landscape or a room with emotion and, as the artists asserts, leaves "no residue of technical mannerisms to stand between my expressions and the observer."

Wyeth's affective capability is palpable in watercolor, a medium which the artist has described as engendering "the atmosphere, the temperature, the sound of snow shifting through the trees or over the ice of a small pond or against a window pane." His singular influence in this medium was acknowledged by Stephen Doherty in "Watercolor" with the assertion that "no other contemporary artist has influenced the way painters use watercolor as much as Wyeth."

In 2007, Wyeth received the National Medal of Arts, cited by the National Endowment for the Arts for portraying "an inner life that is elusive and enigmatic." The artist's reputation for secrecy had become intensified when his ample portfolio of neighbor Helga Tesorf was revealed in 1986. Working with this striking model for fifteen years, Wyeth made 246 sketches, studies, drawings, and paintings, and the magazine-cover stories were accompanied by speculation as to the nature of their relationship.

Garnering the highest prices ever for an American artist, Wyeth is the also the most honored. In 1963, he was the first painter to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In the following decade, he was the first American since John Singer Sargent elected to the Academie des Beaux-Arts, and he was asked to join the Soviet Academy of the Arts; he was subsequently the first living American artist elected to the British Royal Academy. In 1988, he was awarded the Congress Medal of Honor, the highest civilian honor awarded by Congress, with appreciation of an "austere vision" that "has displayed the depth and dignity of rural American life."



Exhibited: Macbeth Gal., NYC, 1937 (first solo exhibit); AIC (solo); MoMA, Corcoran Gal. biennials, 1939-57 (6 times); PAFA Ann., 1938-52 (prize), 1956-62; traveling exh. To England; traveling exh. To PAFA, Baltimore, New York City, Chicago, 1966, de Young MA, 1973; first living American to receive a retrospective at MMA, 1976; Wilmington (DE) Mus. (prize); Butler AI (prize); AAAL, 1947 (prize); AWCS, 1952 (gold); award: Art in America Magazine, 1958; Currier Gallery Art, Manchester, NH; Fogg Art Mus., MA; Univ. Arizona, Tuscon; Mus. FA, Boston; WMAA; Carnegie Inst. (award).

Works held: MMA; MoMA; BMFA; PMA; LACMA; AIC; CPLH; Phillips Acad., Andover; Wadsworth Atheneum; Fansworth Mus., Rockland, ME; Canajoharie Art Gal.; Univ. Newbraska; AGA; New Britain Mus.; Butler AI; Wilmington Mus. Art; Lincoln Mus., England; mural, Delaware Trust Bank, Wilmington; Dallas MFA; Houston MFA; Shelburne (VT) Mus.

Further Reading: The Illustrated Biographical Encyclopedia of Artists of the American West, Peggy and Harold Samuels, Doubleday & Company, Inc., Garden City, New York, 1976.; Who Was Who in American Art 1564-1975: 400 Years of Artists in America, Vol. III. Peter Hastings Falk, Georgia Kuchen and Veronica Roessler, eds.,Sound View Press, Madison, Connecticut, 1999. 3 Vols.

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