Andrew Wyeth’s meticulously-rendered images of rural life made him one of the country’s most popular contemporary artists and a leading exponent of the realist tradition in American art. A loner who worked independently of mainstream trends, Wyeth remained faithful to a naturalistic depiction of the world around him, creating such iconic paintings as Christina’s World (1948; Museum of Modern Art, New York), a work lauded for its sense of poetry, mystery and unsettling ambiguity.
Born in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, on July 12, 1917, Wyeth received his earliest training from his father, the celebrated illustrator N.C. (Newell Convers) Wyeth, who taught him the importance of anatomy and visual acuity. However, for the most part, Wyeth developed his skills on his own, once stating that he "worked everything out by trial and error." His earliest influences, in addition to his father, were the paintings of Winslow Homer and the prints of Albrecht Durer.
Wyeth had his first solo exhibition in 1937, at the Macbeth Gallery in New York City. The show, which consisted of a display of colorful watercolor renderings of Maine, sold out within twenty-four hours. Taken aback by the immediacy of his success, Wyeth decided to focus his creative energies on an art of deeper "substance." He subsequently turned to more serious subject matter, often imbued with symbolic overtones, and began to work with a subdued colorism. In 1939, Wyeth began using egg tempera almost exclusively, a medium that had been introduced to him by his brother-in-law, the western artist, Peter Hurd.
In 1940, Wyeth married Betsy Merle James, who introduced him to her childhood friend, Christina Olsen, the woman portrayed in Christina’s World. Wyeth went on to paint numerous renditions of the Olsen Family, who lived in Cushing, Maine. Another frequently depicted group was the Kuerner Family, Wyeth's neighbors in Chadds Ford. Wyeth's iconography also included young children, blacks, old houses, lonely beaches and portraits of solemn New Englanders.
Despite the intense realism of his work, Wyeth remained deeply concerned with the underlying psychological make-up of his subjects, as well as with the universal themes of nature (allying him further with the penetrating late work of Homer). At the same time, his use of familiar images from his everyday surroundings related him to the nineteenth century American genre tradition and to the Regionalism of the 1920s and 1930s. Similarly, just as Wyeth's pictorial content contrasted sharply with that of contemporary painters, his style also set him apart, based as it was on an almost photographic realism with an emphasis on linearity and graphic pattern.
Wyeth received many important honors and awards and major retrospective exhibitions of his work have been circulated throughout the United States, Europe and Japan. The first artist ever to be featured on the cover of Time magazine (1963), Wyeth divided his time between Chadds Ford and Cushing.
Wyeth continued to paint up until his death in Chadds Ford on January 16, 2009. Examples of his work can be found in public collections throughout the United States, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Brandywine Art Museum, Chadds Ford; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C., among many others.
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