Legacy Matters

Andrew Wyeth, R.I.P.

The Boston Globe -  Andrew Wyeth, austere artist of the familiar, dies.

Andrew Wyeth, whose evocations of a changeless rural present along the Maine coast and in Pennsylvania farm country made him America's most popular living artist and whose 1948 painting "Christina's World" became one of the most famous artworks of the 20th century, died yesterday.
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Perhaps no American painter has ever had as strong a hold on the popular imagination as Mr. Wyeth did over the course of his seven-decade career. As the critic Brian O'Doherty once said, "Wyeth communicates with his audience, numbered in millions, with an ease and fluency that amounts to a kind of genius."


One mark of Mr. Wyeth's special status is how often he was summoned to the White House. He was the first artist to receive the nation's highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, in 1963. President Nixon held an exhibition of his paintings and dinner in his honor in 1970. In 1990, he was the first artist to receive the Congressional Gold Medal. President George H.W. Bush, presenting the award, said that Mr. Wyeth's work "caught the heart of America."

Yet Mr. Wyeth's popularity never translated into critical acclaim. Although rarely dismissed outright, Mr. Wyeth was seen as a peripheral figure, at best, and an artistic anachronism.

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Mr. Wyeth once described his approach to art as "seeing a lot in nothing." There is a sense of almost palpable restraint to his work, of a sought-after narrowing of visual possibility.

Winter, 1945
"I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure in the landscape — the loneliness of it — the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it; the whole story doesn't show.

Washington Post - American Painter

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.

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.

Christina's World

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.

New York Times 

Andrew Wyeth, one of the most popular and also most lambasted artists in the history of American art, a reclusive linchpin in a colorful family dynasty of artists whose precise realist views of hardscrabble rural life became icons of national culture and sparked endless debates about the nature of modern art, died Friday at his home in Chadds Ford, Pa. He was 91.
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virtual Rorschach test for American culture during the better part of the last century, Wyeth split public opinion as vigorously as, and probably even more so than, any other American painter including the other modern Andy, Warhol, whose milieu was as urban as Wyeth’s was rural.
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One picture encapsulated his fame. “Christina’s World” became an American icon like Grant Wood’s “American Gothic,” or Whistler’s portrait of his mother ........Wyeth had seen Christina Olson, crippled from the waist down, dragging herself across a Maine field, “like a crab on a New England shore,” he recalled. To him she was a model of dignity who refused to use a wheelchair and preferred to live in squalor rather than be beholden to anyone. It was dignity of a particularly dour, hardened, misanthropic sort, to which Wyeth throughout his career seemed to gravitate.

Telegraph, U.K.

In 1943 Wyeth exhibited temperas at a show, "American Realists and Magic Realists" (he was included in the latter category), at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York. In the catalogue he made clear the difference between himself and the avant-gardists: "My aim is to seek freedom through significant form and design rather than through the diversion of so-called free and accidental brushwork....Not to exhibit craft but rather to submerge it, and make it rightfully the handmaiden of beauty, power and emotional content."
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Even in those early days Wyeth had little truck with the art establishment, placing himself firmly in the realist tradition of Thomas Eakins, Edward Hopper and Winslow Homer. He was later to display an outspoken contempt for most of the work of the moderns, dismissing as "putrid stuff" paintings by Jackson Pollock, Picasso and Cézanne that hung alongside his own work in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

When asked, in a rare interview in the New York Times, whey he seemed to antagonise so much of the art world, he replied: "I believe in the principle of what I am doing. That challenges them, threatens them. I'm not interested in their profound thoughts on art."