Andrew Wyeth

Andrew Wyeth 2007

Andrew Newell Wyeth (born July 12, 1917 in Chadds Ford , Pennsylvania , † January 16, 2009 there ) was an American realistic painter, one of the most famous of the 20th century . He is sometimes referred to as the "People's Painter" because he is so popular in the United States. His favorite subjects were the country and the people around his hometown Chadds Ford in Pennsylvania and around his summer residence near Cushing , Maine . His best-known work, and one of the best-known in 20th century American art, is Christina's World , which hangs in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City .

Life

Christina's World
1948
Tempera, 81.9 cm × 121.3 cm
Museum of Modern Art ; New York City linked image (please note copyrights )

Childhood and early career

Andrew Wyeth was the son of NC Wyeth , a famous American illustrator and artist. As the youngest of five children, he was homeschooled and learned the art from his father. When he was twenty in 1937, he had his first solo exhibition at the Macbeth Gallery in New York City. The whole show sold out quickly and Wyeth's career had begun. In 1940 he married Betsy Merle James (1922-2020), whom he had met a year earlier in Maine. Betsy introduced him to Anna Christina Olson, who later became the model for his picture of Christina's world . Christina, her brother Alvaro and their weathered house became important motifs in his art for over twenty years. Betsy James Wyeth played a leading role in her husband's career and has always been very supportive of him.

Father's death / 1940s

In 1945, Andrew Wyeth's father and three-year-old nephew were killed when their car stopped on the rails near their home and was hit by a train. Wyeth always said that this event was not only a personal tragedy, but also shaped his artistic career. Shortly thereafter, his art reached its mature and enduring style, which was typical of a muted color palette, realistic rendering, and the use of emotionally charged symbolic objects. In 1948 Wyeth painted Anna and Karl Kuerner, who were her neighbors in Chadds Ford. Along with the Olsons in Maine, the Kuerners and their farm became one of his main motivations for the next thirty years.

Later career

While spending his time partly in Maine and partly in Pennsylvania, Wyeth maintained a relatively consistent realistic style for over fifty years. He focused on a few landscapes and models that can be recognized again and again in his pictures and to which he kept returning over the decades.

Usually he made dozens of studies with pencil or watercolor in order to then paint the actual picture, sometimes as a watercolor, sometimes in a kind of dry painting with watercolors or in egg tempera . With his growing fame, his works fetch higher and higher prices, most recently receiving more than a million dollars per painting from private collectors and at auctions.

Critic reactions

His style has long been controversial. His realistic style of painting contrasted greatly with the abstraction that was common in the United States from the mid-twentieth century. Museum exhibitions of his work were very popular, but many art critics rejected his style. The most frequent accusation was that his pictures were actually illustrations and that out of sentimentality he paints people and landscapes that are close to his heart. Admirers of his works are of the opinion that, in addition to the beauty of his motifs, they also exude strong feelings, are very symbolic and have a subliminal abstraction. In the opinion of most viewers of his works, he used watercolor and egg tempera with great skill. Wyeth had avoided using traditional oil paints after initial experiments.

The "Helga" pictures

A controversial episode in his career surrounded a series of works that Wyeth painted by Helga Testorf, a model he met through the Kuerner family in Chadds Ford. Wyeth began painting Helga in 1971 and she was one of his most important models for over fifteen years. In contrast to his other works, however, he withheld the "Helga" pictures from the public. Not even his wife Betsy was allowed to see them. He didn't show it to her until 1985 and sold it the following year to Leonard Andrews, a private buyer. Andrews drew a lot of attention with these paintings and many major museums wanted to exhibit them. The media ran the story of Wyeth's secret pictures, implicitly suggesting that he had had an affair with the model. After the exhibitions, Andrews sold the paintings to an anonymous Japanese industrialist at a great profit. Some museum directors felt that Wyeth had used them to better sell the paintings. Some art critics thought the story with the secret picture hiding place was a staging. Others simply admired the pictures. After being sold to industrialists, the paintings were often exhibited in museums in the United States and Japan. In December 2005 they were bought by an American who will probably sell them individually.

Museum collections

Andrew Wyeth's paintings are in the collections of most major U.S. museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art , the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and, in the capital, the Smithsonian American Art Museum , the National Gallery of Art and the White House . The Brandywine River Museum in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, the Farnsworth Museum of Art in Rockland, Maine, and the Greenville County Museum of Art in Greenville, South Carolina have a particularly large number of Wyeth paintings .

Prizes and awards

In 1945, Andrew Newell Wyeth was elected a member ( NA ) of the National Academy of Design in New York . In 1950 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters , 1960 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and 1967 to the American Philosophical Society . He was the recipient of many awards, including the 1963 first painter of the President's Medal of Freedom , which John F. Kennedy reintroduced. In 1976 he was accepted as a foreign member of the French Académie des Beaux-Arts . In 1980, Wyeth became the first living American artist to be elected Honorary Member (Hon.RA) of Britain's Royal Academy . In 1987, Bates College awarded him an honorary doctorate. In 1990 President George HW Bush presented him with the Congressional Gold Medal of Honor . In 2007 Wyeth received the National Medal of Arts .

Exhibitions

• 2011/2012: Andrew Wyeth in Perspective , Palm Springs Art Museum , Palm Springs, California, USA.
• 2016: Andrew and Jamie Wyeth in the Studio . Denver Art Museum , Colorado, USA; then in the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza , Madrid.

Web links

• Literature by and about Andrew Wyeth in the catalog of the German National Library
• Andrew Wyeth in the nndb (English)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Betsy Wyeth, Andrew Wyeth's Widow and Collaborator, Dies at 98 , New York Times, April 26, 2020, accessed April 26, 2020
2. ^ Alain Claude Sulzer : The only thing that counts in: Neue Zürcher Zeitung , December 3, 2011
3. ↑ nationalacademy.org: Past Academicians "W" / Wyeth, Andrew Newell NA 1945 ( Memento of the original from August 14, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (accessed on July 20, 2015)  
4. ^ Members: Andrew Wyeth. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed May 5, 2019 (with information on awards). 
5. ^ Member History: Andrew Wyeth. American Philosophical Society, accessed February 4, 2019 . 
6. ↑ database entry in the RACollections , English, accessed April 20, 2013.
7. ↑ http://www.bates.edu/news/2000/10/16/wyeth/