[Deathwatch] Andrew Wyeth, painter, 91

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American Painter Andrew Wyeth Dies at 91

By Bart Barnes
Friday, January 16, 2009

Andrew Wyeth, the popular American painter of rustic landscapes,
farmhouses and plain country folk whose pictures evoked a range of
feelings and emotions and a nostalgic vision of times past, died at
home early Jan. 16 at age 91. No cause of death was reported, according
to the Associated Press.

Mr. Wyeth sketched, painted and drew the people and places of
Pennsylvania's Brandywine River Valley and the rugged Maine coastal
region near Cushing, where he had lived all his life. He died at his
home in the Philadelphia suburb of Chadds Ford, according to Hillary
Holland, a spokeswoman for the Brandywine River Museum, the AP
reported.

His artistry was of fields and hillsides, wildlife, sawmills,
springhouses, farmhands, farm tools, fixtures and furniture. It was
symbolic and paradoxical, expressing tranquillity and turbulence,
tenderness and rigor, cruelty and compassion. Some of it included such
discordant details as hanging animal carcasses, rifles, hunters, meat
hooks, peeling paint, cracked ceilings, fallen and sharply sawed or
broken logs that conveyed subliminal suggestions of violence and decay,
and a sense of loss.

One of the most widely recognized and highly priced American artists of
his era, Mr. Wyeth was probably best known for his 1948 painting,
"Christina's World," which shows a young crippled woman in a pink dress
crawling across a brown field toward a bleak and distant farmhouse. In
its degree of familiarity, this picture was once compared with the
portrait of George Washington that appears on the $1 bill.

In the 1980s, Mr. Wyeth was the subject of an intense media spotlight
for his "Helga" series of 45 paintings and 200 sketches. These
pictures, many of them nudes, were the product of hundreds of modeling
sessions with a Chadds Ford neighbor, Helga Testorf, over a 15-year
period. No one else, not even Mr. Wyeth's wife, had previously known
about them, and their disclosure to the public was arguably the art
event of the decade.

A household name in the national artistic community since the middle
years of the 20th century, Mr. Wyeth rose to prominence in the same
period in which the abstract expressionist painters of the New York
School were establishing their mark as the mainstream artists of the
era.

His work was different. The abstract expressionists did
non-representational compositions, characterized by what they said was
a spontaneous and self-expressive application of paint. They often
worked in bright and flowing colors with flamboyant brush strokes.

Mr. Wyeth painted in pale colors, lighter shades of brown, red, yellow
and black, and the shapes and objects in his pictures were concrete and
easily recognizable. Houses looked like houses and people looked like
people. He favored fall and winter landscapes, which he believed gave
the impression of a deeper and unarticulated meaning; his messages were
indirectly conveyed. Rarely did he speak or communicate with others in
his profession, and in his personal life he tended to be reclusive.

As an artist he was generally considered a realist, but he never
accepted that characterization. "In the art world today, I'm so
conservative I'm radical. Most painters don't care for me. I'm strange
to them," he said in a 1965 interview with Richard Meryman for Life
magazine. "A lot of people say I've brought realism back. They try to
tie me up with Eakins and Winslow Homer. To my mind they are mistaken.
I honestly consider myself an abstractionist. Eakins' figures actually
breathe in the frame. My people, my objects breathe in a different way;
there's another core -- an excitement that's definitely abstract."

To many critics, Mr. Wyeth was out of touch with the primary artistic
trends of his time, and the quality of his work failed to merit his
popularity with the general public. Nor did it justify the prices
people were willing to pay -- a collection of Wyeth works including
several of the Helga paintings brought $40 million in a 1989 sale.

"Compared to master draftsmen, Wyeth cannot draw," wrote Washington
Post art critic Paul Richard in a 1987 review of an exhibition of the
Helga paintings at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. New
York's Village Voice newspaper called Mr. Wyeth's art "formulaic stuff,
not very effective even as institutional realism . . ."

The prestigious Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York refused even to
display the Helga paintings. "We had an opportunity to show the Helga
series. We quite pointedly and as a conscious decision declined to do
so," said museum director Philippe de Montebello in 1987.

But a collector of Wyeth art, Leonard E.B. Andrews, who once owned the
Helga paintings, called them "a national treasure." Mr. Wyeth, he said,
"is so far ahead of any other living artist, it is hard to name the
second best."

At a 1970 dinner and private exhibition of his paintings at the White
House, President Richard M. Nixon toasted Mr. Wyeth as the artist who
"caught the heart of America." Critic Jay Jacobs once called him "the
spiritual leader of Middle America." In Maine, Daniel O'Leary, director
of the Portland Museum of Art, said of Mr. Wyeth: "Two hundred million
people will tell you he's their favorite artist, but museums and
critics haven't always been willing to deal with that," the Portland
Press Herald reported in a story on the artist's 80th birthday.

Mr. Wyeth continued painting into the new millennium, even as his age
advanced, with his later works reflecting frustration with the physical
limits and frailties that were setting in. Social critic Paul Johnson
in a 2003 book identified Wyeth as "the only narrative artist of genius
during the second half of the twentieth century." In November 2007,
President Bush awarded Mr. Wyeth the National Medal of Arts.

The youngest child in a family with five children, Mr. Wyeth was born
in Chadds Ford, the son of N.C. Wyeth, the famous illustrator who was
best known for his illustrations of such literary classics as "Treasure
Island," and "Last of the Mohicans." As a young man, N.C. Wyeth had
moved his family to Chadds Ford from New England to study under the
legendary turn-of-the-century illustrator Howard Pyle.

Three of the Wyeth children, including Andrew, would become artists.
Two of his sisters, Carolyn Wyeth and Henriette Wyeth Hurd, were
accomplished painters. A third sister, Ann Wyeth McCoy was a musician
and married to a painter. His brother, Nathaniel, was a scientist. One
of Andrew Wyeth's sons, James Wyeth, also became a painter.

As a child, Andrew Wyeth was sickly and received most of his schooling
at home under private tutors. During the summers, his family was in
Maine, returning to Chadds Ford in the autumn and remaining there until
late the following spring when the cycle began once again. This
migratory pattern would continue throughout his life.

>From the collection of historical props and costumes in N.C. Wyeth's
illustrations studio, the young Andrew Wyeth found nourishment for his
romantic fantasies. From N.C. Wyeth himself, the young Andrew learned
how to use the materials and tools of painting. But the famed
illustrator did not impose his own techniques on his son.
Responsibility for cultivating his artistic technique lay within the
future artist himself.

As a young man, he did watercolor landscapes and seascapes of the Maine
coastal region where he spent his summers. These provided the substance
of his first one-man show, at the William Macbeth Gallery in New York
in October 1937, when he was 20 years old. During the World War II
years he began painting in temperas, a thickish egg-based paint that
enabled him to achieve extraordinary textures. He said he liked the
paint because "it has a cocoon-like feeling of dry lostness -- almost a
lonely feeling."

A major turning point in his life came in 1945 with the death of his
father, who was killed when his car stalled on railroad tracks and was
hit by a mail train at a Chadds Ford railroad crossing. Also killed in
the accident was the illustrator's 4-year-old grandson, a nephew of
Andrew Wyeth. "When he died, I was just a clever watercolorist -- lots
of swish and swash," Mr. Wyeth said.

His father's death, Mr. Wyeth would say later, left him with a
compelling need to prove himself as an artist. He spent the following
winter working on what came to be one of his most recognized pictures,
a tempera known simply as "Winter 1946." It was a painting of a boy
running down a bare, brown hill, casting a shadow in the winter
sunlight. Like so much of his art, it took on an intensely personal
meaning for its creator, and the very act of working on it became
cathartic, Mr. Wyeth said.

On the other side of the hill in the painting was the rail crossing
where N.C. Wyeth was killed. While he was working on the picture,
Andrew Wyeth was overcome with remorse that he had never painted his
father. In his own mind the hill became his father, and painting it
exorcised his remorse and endowed his art with purpose and meaning.

Two years later his most famous painting, "Christina's World," came
about almost by happenstance. Since 1939 Mr. Wyeth had been doing
drawings and paintings of two Maine neighbors, Christina Olson, and her
younger brother, Alvaro, who lived in a house built by their
great-grandfather on a promontory jutting out into the Atlantic Ocean.

One summer day, Mr. Wyeth looked out from an upstairs window in the
Olson house and saw Christina, who had been crippled by polio as a
child, crawling across a field. This image registered in his memory,
but he did nothing with it immediately. Some time later he made a
pencil drawing of the Olson house and still later added the field
surrounding it. But the sight of Christina in her pink dress crawling
across the brown grass haunted him, and he put her in the picture.

For months, "Christina's World" hung virtually unnoticed in Mr. Wyeth's
summer home. Visitors who did see it appeared unmoved. But in 1949 it
was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and over time it
became one of the premier icons in American art history.

Again and again over the next two decades, Mr. Wyeth would do
watercolor paintings, pencil drawings and temperas of Christina Olson,
her house and her environment. Among the better known of these were
"Wind from the Sea" (1947), "Seed Corn" (1948), and "Weather Side"
(1965). The last of these pictures was "End of Olsons," painted in
1969, shortly after Christina and Alvaro died. Until the disclosure of
the Helga paintings, Christina may have been one of the most famous
models in modern American art.

Of like frequency as subjects of Mr. Wyeth's art were Anna and Karl
Kuerner, his German-born Pennsylvania neighbors, who operated a
150-acre farm near Chadds Ford. He painted what he considered to be his
best portrait, "Karl," in 1948, after having made several preliminary
drawings. It shows Kuerner's visage, head and shoulders, under a
cracked ceiling with two sharp-looking ceiling hooks, and it conveys a
sense of foreboding and menace.

It was soon after his father's death that Mr. Wyeth began painting the
Kuerners, and he came to see Karl Kuerner not only as a neighbor but
also as a surrogate father figure. Kuerner was a hardboiled and
pragmatic farmer, who slaughtered animals with cold efficiency, but he
also had a streak of sentimentality. He was capable of extreme cruelty.
A veteran of German army service in World War I, he once told Mr. Wyeth
of having mowed down a line of advancing American soldiers, then
lowering the sights of his machine gun and going over them again.

Not surprisingly, the carcasses of slaughtered animals figured in some
of the Kuerner paintings. Weapons were featured prominently in at least
two. "Karl's Room," a 1954 watercolor, shows a bare room, with only a
wood chest on the floor and a rifle hanging by its strap from a wall
hook. In "The Kuerners," a 1971 drybrush, Kuerner is cradling a rifle
in his arm, the barrel pointed directly backward at his wife behind
him. Betsy Wyeth, Andrew Wyeth's wife, called this painting, "America's
Sweethearts."

Other Kuerner pictures included "Spring Fed," a 1967 tempera showing
the interior of a milk room at the Kuerner farm; "Ground Hog Day," a
1959 tempera depicting winter sunlight and sawed logs, seen through a
window from inside the Kuerner home; and "Evening at Kuerners," a 1970
watercolor landscape of the Kuerner house and outbuilding on a
hillside.

Sometime in the early 1970s, Mr. Wyeth began a series of sketches,
paintings and drawings of a 38-year-old neighbor, Helga Testorf.
Periodically over the next decade and a half, they met privately for
hundreds of modeling sessions. When they did become public knowledge in
1985, there was an immediate sensation in the art world, fueled by
media speculation that there was more to their relationship than that
of an artist and his model.

National news magazines did cover stories on the Helga pictures, and
there were hundreds of stories on television and in the daily press.
Betsy Wyeth made no secret that her husband's relationship with his
Teutonic model had severely strained their marriage. This was followed
by accusations that the whole brouhaha was no more than a cleverly
orchestrated publicity stunt, which was vigorously denied by Mr. Wyeth.


For several years the controversy simmered, fueling an already aroused
public interest. A nationwide tour of the Helga pictures opened to
great fanfare at the National Gallery of Art in Washington in 1987. The
catalog for this tour became the main selection for the Book of the
Month Club, the first art book ever so chosen.

But the Helga tour failed to live up to its hyperbolic predictions. Its
reviews were middling to poor. "This is a mediocre show. It is too big
and too monotonous," wrote Paul Richard in The Washington Post.
Interest dwindled and the show ended all but unnoticed in September
1989 at the Brooklyn Museum.

Into his 80s, Mr. Wyeth continued to meander the back roads and byways
of Chadds Ford, continuing to paint when the spirit moved him. His
family had long been something of a cottage industry in the region. The
Brandywine Museum displays the art of three generations of Wyeths, and
N.C. Wyeth's studio is now part of the museum. Andrew Wyeth lived in an
18th-century miller's house, a gristmill used as a studio, and a
converted granary, all of which had been carefully restored.

The Chadds Ford Inn, built in 1736, has menus decorated with Andrew
Wyeth's sketches of Washington and Lafayette, who fought the British
there during the Revolutionary War. There is a table in a corner of the
dining room reserved for him.

In May of 1940, Mr. Wyeth married Betsy James, the daughter of a Maine
newspaper editor. They had met the previous July when the Wyeth family
was in Maine for the summer. They had two sons, Nicholas and James.

Many thanks to Deathwatch Central for posting this obituary