Andrew Wyeth Wallpaper, Paintings, Painting Art Wallpapers

Andrew Newell Wyeth came to painting by birth and inheritance. He was born July 12, 1917, in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, the son of Newell Convers and Carolyn Wyeth. His father was the great illustrator of such childhood classics as Kidnapped and Treasure Island. Andrew was a weak and sickly child. His formal schooling consisted of three months in the first grade of a country grammar school. Thereafter, he studied some at home, although he never really mastered spelling. Mostly, he roamed the countryside in solitude or stayed in the house playing with tin soldiers. Imbued with the love of narrative that shines from his father's work, Andrew spent almost a year creating a miniature theater. They were the players, sets, and costumes for a one-man production of Arthur Conan Doyle's romance The White Company, which he presented to the family at age 15. Deeply impressed by Andrew's virtuosity, his father immediately took him on as apprentice and student.

When Wyeth was ten his family began spending summers in Maine, a tradition the artist has continued his entire life. During his teenage years, Wyeth's early forays into watercolor painting were of the Maine landscape and ocean vistas, and with these he enjoyed his first one-man show at New York's William Macbeth Gallery in 1937. All of the works were sold, but Wyeth felt almost disheartened by his early success. He began to experiment with rendering the human form, perhaps the most difficult of all subjects. As an exercise, his father recommended that he sketch a skeleton from every possible angle.

His work as a young American artist of this period set him apart from his contemporaries, who were busy experimenting with more radical, abstract styles. Noted art critic John Russell remarked to Newsweek that Wyeth's "work has always had a secret and subterranean motivation, conscious or unconscious, which surfaces in strange and unexpected ways."

In 1945 Wyeth's father was killed at a railroad crossing in Chadds Ford, and the sudden death made Wyeth resolve to take his artistic career more seriously. He began to use models, often painting them over several years, a practice which he began in 1939 when he met Christina Olson. The Maine woman was a friend of Betsy Merle James, who would later become Wyeth's wife. Olson was paralyzed from polio, and Wyeth's image of her in a field, Christina's World (1948), is perhaps his most famous work. He continued to render Olson, or her Maine house, in a series of works that stretched on until the late 1960s, including Miss Olson (1952) and Weather Side (1965).

Wyeth and his wife Betsy bought a set of farm buildings in Chadds Ford dating back to the 18th century and restored it as a studio for him and a home for the couple and their two sons, Jamie and Nicholas. (Jamie would eventually become a painter himself). In the late 1940s Wyeth became fascinated with Karl Kuerner, a farmer of German origin who lived nearby, and Wyeth painted images of Kuerner and his property, as well as his wife Anna, over the next few decades. In Maine, where the Wyeth family spent the summer months, the artist also befriended another neighbor who became a frequent subject. Teenaged Siri Erickson was the subject of several portraits that Wyeth painted during the 1960s.

Most major American museums have examples of Wyeth's work. He was given a large retrospective at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1967. Earlier, and for many years, he was more or less systematically ignored by American art officials, although not by critics, because his work seemed so completely removed from mainstream American art. President John F. Kennedy awarded him the Medal of Freedom in 1963, and The National Institute of Arts and Letters bestowed its 1965 gold medal for Wyeth's artistic achievements. In 1970 Wyeth then had a one-man exhibition in the White House, the first ever held there.

Wyeth's name, however, remains best associated in the public's mind with the "Helga" media event of 1986. Apparently, the artist had been sketching and painting a German immigrant by the name of Helga Testorf since the early 1970s. A friend of the Kuerners, she also worked as a cleaning woman for Wyeth's sister. With her reddish-blond hair, Teutonic face, and twin braids, Helga made a quietly enigmatic subject, and Wyeth's obsession with her as a subject eventually numbered 240 works of art - supposedly without the knowledge of his wife. In early 1986 he invited Leonard E.B. Andrews, an American art collector who had previously acquired a few Wyeths, into his studio; Andrews later recalled that he was overwhelmed by the drama of the cache, and asserted that the works as a whole were a "national treasure." He purchased the Helga series in its entirety. The stern visage of Helga, as depicted by Wyeth in the 1979 tempera Braids, appeared on magazine covers throughout the summer of 1986 in the sensationalist stories that accompanied the unleashing of such a large, secret stash of paintings by an acclaimed American artist.

Later Andrews reportedly tried to sell the series to a buyer in Japan for $45 million, having paid only $6 million for them in 1986. It mirrored a trend in the collection of Wyeth's work, as Japanese high bidders were eagerly carting his paintings off at auctions when they appeared. "They like em; they deserve em," Wyeth noted in a 1990 interview with Thomas Hoving, former Metropolitan Museum Art director, featured in Connoisseur. Then 73, Wyeth was still painting, but the artist "has changed in one significant way," asserted Hoving. "He is now bathing his paintings with real light, what the French would call plein air." For example, in Snow Hill (1987) anonymous figures dance in the snow around a maypole, and Wyeth called it a summation of his career as an artist. "I've never said anything about it other than to say that it's all the people I've painted who mean a great deal to me - Karl and Anna Kuerner …, Helga … and X.' It's Kuerner's farm and the railroad tracks where my father was killed." Wyeth admitted that he had tried to infuse the landscape with the spirit of his father. "I got enamored with it and I painted on it like mad. It is my [19th-century French artist Gustave] Courbet's Studio, in which all his models are there, watching. My models are watching me and dancing because they all hope I'm dead. Ha! I'm there, but I'm gone."

The best book on Wyeth is Richard Meryman, Andrew Wyeth (1968). All the major paintings, as well as a number of the dry-brush watercolors, are reproduced in excellent color. In the text Wyeth discusses the people and places of his paintings. A specialized study is Agnes Mongan, Andrew Wyeth: Dry Brush and Pencil Drawings (1966).

See also Thomas Hoving, Andrew Wyeth: autobiography by Andrew Wyeth, 1995; John Wilmerding, Andrew Wyeth: the Helga Picgtures, 1987; Gene Logsdon Wyeth People: a Portrait of Andrew Wyeth as Seen by His Friends and Neighbors, 1971.

Andrew Newell Wyeth (surname pronounced /ˈwaɪ.ɛθ/;^[1] July 12, 1917 – January 16, 2009)^[2] was a visual artist, primarily a realist painter, working predominantly in a regionalist style. He was one of the best-known U.S. artists of the middle 20th century, and was sometimes referred to as the "Painter of the People," due to his work's popularity with the American public.

In his art, Wyeth's favorite subjects were the land and people around him, both in his hometown of Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, and at his summer home in Cushing, Maine.

Childhood and early career

Andrew Wyeth was the youngest of the five children of illustrator and artist N.C. (Newell Convers) Wyeth and his wife, Carolyn Bockius Wyeth. He was the brother of inventor Nathaniel Wyeth and artist Henriette Wyeth Hurd, and the father of Nicholas Wyeth and artist Jamie Wyeth. Andrew was home-tutored because of his frail health, and learned art from his father, who inspired his son's love of rural landscapes, sense of romance, and a feeling for Wyeth family history and artistic traditions.^[3] Wyeth started drawing at a young age, and with his father’s guidance, he mastered figure study and watercolor, and later learned egg tempera from brother-in-law Peter Hurd. He studied art history on his own, admiring many masters of Renaissance and American painting, especially Winslow Homer.^[4] Like his father, the young Wyeth read and appreciated the poetry of Robert Frost and writings of Henry Thoreau and studied their relationships with nature. Music and movies also heightened his artistic sensitivity.

In 1937, at age twenty, Wyeth had his first one-man exhibition of watercolors at the Macbeth Gallery in New York City. The entire inventory of paintings sold out, and his life path seemed certain. His style was different from his father’s: more spare, "drier," and more limited in color range. He stated his belief that "…the great danger of the Pyle school is picture-making."^[4] He did some book illustrations in his early career, but not to the extent that N.C. Wyeth did.

[edit] Father's death, 1940s

In 1940, Wyeth married Betsy James. Their first child Nicholas was born in 1943, followed by James ("Jamie") three years later. Wyeth painted portraits of both children.

In October 1945, his father and his three-year-old nephew, Newell Convers Wyeth II (b. 1941), were killed when their car stalled on railroad tracks near their home and was struck by a train. Wyeth referred to his father's death as a formative emotional event in his artistic career, in addition to being a personal tragedy.^[5] Shortly afterwards, Wyeth's art consolidated into his mature and enduring style; it was characterized by a subdued color palette, realistic renderings, and the depiction of emotionally charged, symbolic objects and/or people.

It was at the Olson farm in Cushing, Maine that he painted Christina's World (1948). Perhaps his most famous image, it depicts his neighbor, Christina Olson, sprawled on a dry field facing her house in the distance. Wyeth was quite inspired by his neighbor, who, because of an unknown illness resulting in her inability to walk, spent much time on the property surrounding her house.

Also in 1948, he began painting Anna and Karl Kuerner, his neighbours in Chadds Ford. Like the Olsons, the Kuerners and their farm were one of Wyeth's most important subjects for nearly 30 years. Wyeth stated about the Kuerner Farm, “I didn’t think it a picturesque place. It just excited me, purely abstractly and purely emotionally.”^[6]

The Olson house has been preserved, renovated to match its appearance in Christina's World. It is open to the public as a part of the Farnsworth Art Museum. The Kuerners' farm is available to tour through the Brandywine River Museum, as is the N.C. Wyeth home and studio.

[edit] Mature career

Dividing his time between Pennsylvania and Maine, Wyeth maintained a realist painting style for over fifty years. He gravitated to several identifiable landscape subjects and models. In 1958, Andrew and Betsy Wyeth purchased and restored "The Mill," a group of 18th-century buildings that appeared often in his work, including Night Sleeper (1979). His solitary walks were the primary means of inspiration for his landscapes. He developed an extraordinary intimacy with the land and sea and strove for a spiritual understanding based on history and unspoken emotion. He typically created dozens of studies on a subject in pencil or loosely brushed watercolor before executing a finished painting, either in watercolor, drybrush (a watercolor style in which the water is squeezed from the brush), or egg tempera.

When Christina Olsen died in the winter of 1969, Wyeth refocused his artistic attention upon Siri Erickson, capturing her naked innocence in Indian Summer (1970). It was a prelude to the Helga paintings. His wife, Betsy, played an important role in his career and many critics thought she manipulated his image. She was once quoted say "I am a director and I had the greatest actor in the world." ^[7]

[edit] Helga paintings

In 1986, extensive coverage was given to the revelation of a series of 247 studies of Wyeth's neighbour, the Prussian-born Helga Testorf. Wyeth painted her over the period 1971–85 without the knowledge of either Wyeth's wife or John Testorf, Helga's husband. The paintings were stored at the home of his student, neighbor and good friend, Frolic Weymouth. Helga is a musician, baker, caregiver, and friend of the Wyeths. She met Wyeth when she was attending to Karl Kuerner. She had never modeled before, but quickly became comfortable with the long periods of posing, during which he observed and painted her in intimate detail. The Helga pictures are not an obvious psychological study of the subject, but more an extensive study of her physical landscape set within Wyeth's customary landscapes. She is nearly always unsmiling and passive; yet, within those deliberate limitations, Wyeth manages to convey subtle qualities of character and mood, as he does in many of his best portraits. This extensive study of one subject studied in differing contexts and emotional states is unique in American art.^[8]

In 1986, millionaire Leonard E.B. Andrews purchased almost the entire collection, preserving it intact. Wyeth had already given a few Helga paintings to friends, including the famous Lovers, which had been given as a gift to Wyeth's wife.^[9]

The works were exhibited at the National Gallery of Art in 1987 and in a coast-to-coast tour.^[10] The Helga works were briefly owned by a private Japanese industrialist, who had agreed to allow additional exhibitions. Since then the collection has returned to the U.S. and has been split up in sales, contrary to the original intentions of many to keep the collection together. Pieces are now in many public and private collections. In March 2002, Wyeth painted Gone, his last Helga picture. It joined the collection on recent tours between 2002–06.

[edit] Critical reaction

Wyeth's art has long been controversial. As a representational artist, Wyeth created work in sharp contrast to abstraction, which gained currency in American art and critical thinking in the middle of the 20th century.

Museum exhibitions of Wyeth's paintings have set attendance records, but many art critics have evaluated his work less favorably. Peter Schjeldahl, art critic for The Village Voice, derided his paintings as "Formulaic stuff, not very effective even as illustrational 'realism.' "^[11] Common criticisms are that Wyeth's art verges on illustration and that his rural subject matter is sentimental.

Admirers of Wyeth's art believe that his paintings, in addition to their pictorial formal beauty, contain strong emotional currents, symbolic content, and underlying abstraction. Most observers of his art agree that he is skilled at handling the media of egg tempera (which uses egg yolk as its medium) and watercolor. Wyeth avoided using traditional oil paints. His use of light and shadow let the subjects illuminate the canvas. His paintings and titles suggest sound, as is implied in many paintings, including Distant Thunder (1961) and Spring Fed (1967).^[12]

Bo Bartlett, a close friend and student of Wyeth, commented on his teacher's reaction to criticism during an interview with Brian Sherwin in 2008: "People only make you swerve. I won’t show anybody anything I’m working on. If they hate it, it’s a bad thing, and if they like it, it’s a bad thing. An artist has to be ingrown to be any good."^[13]

[edit] Museum collections

[edit] Honors and awards

[edit] Death

On January 16, 2009, Andrew Wyeth died in his sleep at his home in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, after a brief illness. He was 91 years old.^[16]

[edit] In popular culture

[edit] Further information

[edit] See also

[edit] References

^ See inogolo:pronunciation of Andrew Wyeth.
^ Artist Andrew Wyeth dies at age 91 Retrieved January 16, 2009
^ James H. Duff, An American Vision: Three Generations of Wyeth Art, Boston, 1987, Little Brown & Company, ISBN 0-8212-1652-X, p. 33
^ ^a ^b An American Vision, p. 38
^ Duff, An American Vision, p. 42
^ Duff, An American Vision, p. 120
^ Kimmelman, Michael (16 January 2009), Andrew Wyeth, Painter, Dies at 91, New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/17/arts/design/17wyeth.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&hp, retrieved 21 August 2010
^ Duff, An American Vision, p. 123
^ "Andrew Wyeth's Stunning Secret," Time, Monday, Aug. 18, 1986
^ Andrew Wyeth's Helga Pictures: An Intimate Study, Traditional Fine Arts Organization
^ Daniel Grant, "When the pens of critics sting," Christian Science Monitor, 1/8/99, Vol. 91, Issue 30
^ Duff, An American Vision, p. 121
^ "Art Space Talk: Bo Bartlett," Myartspace, 12/8/2007
^ "Andrew Wyeth Exhibit", Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2006]
^ ^a ^b ^c Statement on Death of Andrew Wyeth, January 16, 2009, reprinted in Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, Vol. 45, No 2. January 19, 2009
^ Artist Andrew Wyeth dies at age 91
^ The Art of Andrew Wyeth, Wanda M. Corn, Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, p. 95.
^ "Notes from a Chadds Ford Redneck about "The Village" — Chadds Ford Inspirations". Archived from the original on 2009-10-25. http://www.webcitation.org/5knI1Fl9Y.

[edit] Writings

[edit] External links

Tags: Biography of Andrew Wyeth, Paintings, Art, Wors Gallery, Desktop, Painting

Christina's World - About Anderew Wyeth's Painting Christina's World

The Olson House in Cushing, Maine became the subject of Andrew Wyeth's famous painting, Christina's World. Facts, photos, and resources to plan your trip.

http://architecture.about.com/cs/housetours/a/wyeth.htm

Christina's World - An In-Depth Look at the Andrew Wyeth Painting ...

Andrew Wyeth painted this in 1948. His father, NC Wyeth, had been killed at a railway crossing just three years earlier, and Andrew's work underwent a ...

http://arthistory.about.com/od/famous_paintings/ss/andrew_wyeth_christinas_world.htm

Andrew Wyeth Bio - American Painter Andrew Wyeth

Jan 16, 2009 ... A biographical profile of Andrew Wyeth, American painter.

http://arthistory.about.com/cs/namesww/p/wyeth_a.htm

Book Review Andrew Wyeth Biography by Richard Meryman

A review of the biography of artist Andrew Wyeth by Richard Meryman.

http://painting.about.com/od/productreviews/gr/wyeth_biography.htm

Andrew Wyeth, 1917-2009

Jan 16, 2009 ... A spokesperson for the Brandywine River Museum announced that artist Andrew Wyeth passed away on the morning of Friday, January 16, 2009. ...

http://arthistory.about.com/b/2009/01/16/andrew-wyeth-1917-2009.htm

Andrew Wyeth: Memory and Magic Exhibition at the Philadelphia ...

Andrew Wyeth: Memory and Magic, an exhibition that examines seven decades of the world renowned artist from Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania will run from March 29 ...

http://philadelphia.about.com/od/calendarofevents/a/andrew_wyeth_a.htm

Wyeth Art

The art of Andrew, Jamie, and NC Wyeth. ... Contact information for Frank Fowler , representing Andrew Wyeth in the sale of original paintings, ...

http://portlandme.about.com/od/wyethart/Wyeth_Art.htm

Did Christina Olson Have Polio?

Jul 12, 2009 ... Andrew Wyeth (American, 1917-2009) Christina's World, 1948 ... Christina's World - An In-Depth Look at the Andrew Wyeth Painting Chris. ...

http://arthistory.about.com/b/2009/07/12/did-christina-olson-have-polio.htm

Recommended Art and Painting Books

Andrew Wyeth Biography by Richard Meryman. A review of the biography of artist Andrew Wyeth by Richard Meryman. The Artist's Studio, edited by Giles ...

http://painting.about.com/od/productreviews/Recommended_Art_and_Painting_Books.htm

Art History - Profile

A biographical profile of Andrew Wyeth, American painter. ... A biographical profile of N. C. (Newell Convers) Wyeth (1882-1945), American illustrator. ...

http://arthistory.about.com/od/namesw1/p/