Andrew Newell Wyeth (1917-  )

Imagine the life of a youngster unable to attend public school because of respiratory problems and being tutored and left with much spare time. This was the childhood of Andrew Newell Wyeth. He was born in the idyllic Pennsylvania farming village of Chadds Ford in the valley of the Brandywine River on July 12, 1917, the youngest of five children of Newell Convers and Carolyn Brenneman Wyeth. Once interviewed about his childhood and early exposure to drawing and painting, Wyeth stated, "I played alone, and wandered a great deal over the hills, painting watercolors that literally exploded, slapdash over my pages, and drew in pencil or pen and ink in a wild and undisciplined manner."

Andrew's father, N.C. Wyeth, was a famous illustrator of books and a muralist. At 15, Andrew began to work in his father's studio and was given instruction on the materials used by painters. There was no attempt to channel Andrew's skill into that of N.C. He was allowed to nurture the style he was to become famous for all by himself. Although his work is representational, Wyeth is often referred to as an abstractionist--not because his paintings fail to exactly duplicate their subjects, but because they are often used as metaphors.

From family summers spent in Maine, Wyeth grew to love and depict the seashore in his work, as well as the pine trees he knew in New England. Both images are frequent subjects in Wyeth's most famous works. Immediate success, however, did not reassure Wyeth, an exceedingly self-critical artist. Feeling that his work was too easy and spontaneous, he returned to his father's studio to pursue realism by concentrating on the human figure; and over a period of several months, at the suggestion of his father, drew a skeleton from all angles.

In 1942 Wyeth experimented with tempera, introduced to the medium by his brother-in-law, acclaimed artist Peter Hurd. Along with the new media, Wyeth used a dry brush method that became the essence of his style. He continued to create wildly enthusiastic watercolor works and used the new tempera as well.

The turning point in his career occurred when his father died. The death was a tragic accident, where N.C. Wyeth's auto was struck by a train on the railway near their home. Of the tragedy, Andrew stated, "When he died, I was just a clever watercolorist-lots of swish and swash." The tragic accident left him with the resolve "to really do something serious" with his talent and training; and so with his father's death, "the landscape took on a meaning--the quality of him."

The rigor with which Wyeth attacked his material caused him to seek exhibitions. For one catalog he is quoted as saying, "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."

Emotion ruled most of Wyeth's work. For Wyeth, the Pennsylvania countryside meant solid stone walls and soggy, rich earth. This was in contrast to Maine, which seemed to him "all dry bones and desiccated sinews," as he was quoted in the catalogue of his Metropolitan Museum of Art show. But Maine also appealed to him because of a simplicity that he found to be disappearing elsewhere in America, and he tried to capture the true essence of the people and the land in his works of that region.

Andrew met and married Betsy Merle James, the daughter of a newspaper editor. At their first meeting, Betsy James had taken Wyeth to Cushing to introduce him to her long-time friend Christina Olson, who had been crippled by polio in childhood. It was her weather-beaten, three-story, steep-roofed, clapboard house built on a coastal cliff, rather than Christina herself, that attracted Wyeth's interest on that occasion. But Christina's personality and qualities that seemed to Wyeth to represent Maine gradually made her his favorite subject. "Christina's World" (1948), a tempera owned by the Museum of Modern Art, has a haunting appeal and broad symbolism that account largely for its having become probably Wyeth's most popular work.

It is our fortune to have the talent of this great American painter. Although he is recorded to be the recipient of the highest selling price for any living American painter, the critics often hit him with comments of "narrow scope" and "limited subject depiction." While he did select the areas of Pennsylvania and New England that he loved as subjects on a repeated basis, nothing can take from him the skill, emotion and splendor of these simple scenes. His genius is well documented and his public loves the work to which he has dedicated himself.

See examples of Andrew Wyeth's work at www.awyeth.com and judge for yourself. Haunting images, raw emotion and unexcelled expertise in manipulation of his media make Andrew Wyeth a national treasure.

Wyeth on Exhibit

Andrew Wyeth: Memory & Magic, a retrospective that surveys seven decades of the artist's achievement, is the inaugural exhibit at the Susan and John Wieland Pavilion, one of the High Museum's three new buildings designed by Renzo Piano in Atlanta, GA. The exhibit features approximately 100 tempera paintings, watercolors and drawings from the 1930's to the present on view through February 26. The show then travels to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA, where it will be on view from March 25 through July 16.

Copyright ARTtalk Vol. 16 No. 2 -- December 2005