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Who2 Biography:Andrew Wyeth,
Artist
- Born: 12 July 1917
- Birthplace: Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania
-
Died: 16 January 2009
- Best Known As: The American painter who did the Helga series
Andrew Newell Wyeth's 1948 painting Christina's World is one
of the most recognized American paintings of the 20th century. Wyeth,
the youngest son of noted illustrator N.C. Wyeth (1882-1945), grew up in
Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania and on the coast of Maine, and began painting
at an early age. He had his first one-man show in New York in 1937 and
has had a successful painting career ever since. A realist who paints
portraits and scenes of Americana in water color and egg tempera, Wyeth
became one of the nation's most popular and celebrated artists by the
1970s. Though Wyeth shuns public attention, he made headlines in 1986
with the revelation that he'd secretly done nearly 250 paintings
(1971-85) of a family acquaintance, Helga Testorf (The Helga Pictures). His many paintings include The Trodden Weed (1951), Tenant Farmer (1961), April Wind (1952) and Indian Summer (1970).
Wyeth is also related to inventor Nathaniel Wyeth (brother, 1911-90)
and painters Henriette Wyeth Hurd (sister, 1907-97) and Jamie Wyeth
(son, b. 1946).
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia:Andrew
Newell Wyeth
(born July 12, 1917, Chadds Ford, Pa., U.S. — died Jan. 16, 2009, Chadds Ford) U.S. painter. He was trained by his father, N.C.
Wyeth. His subject matter comes almost entirely from the area around
Chadds Ford and around his summer home in Cushing, Maine. Though his
technique is precise and detailed, he uses it to achieve an unreal,
visionary quality. His palette is restricted largely to earth colours.
His famous Christina's World (1948), depicting a polio
victim seemingly trying to climb a hill, exemplifies his mastery of
unusual angles and his use of light to pinpoint time. Between 1971 and
1985 Wyeth secretly painted Helga Testorf, his neighbour in Chadds Ford,
creating hundreds of images of her, including nudes. He was the first
painter ever awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom (1963) and the
first artist to receive the Congressional Gold Medal (1990). His son
Jamie also had a successful painting career.
For more information on Andrew Newell Wyeth, visit Britannica.com.
Art Encyclopedia:Andrew (Newell)
Wyeth
(b Chadds Ford, PA, 12 July 1917). American painter. Owing to his
fragile health he was taught at home as a child by tutors and by his
father Newell Convers Wyeth (1882-1945), a distinguished illustrator who
gave him a rigorous training in draughtsmanship. In about 1933 he first
saw the watercolours of Winslow Homer, prompting him to paint
impressionistic watercolours that captured fleeting effects of light and
movement, as in the Coot Hunter (1941; Chicago, IL, A. Inst.).
He first exhibited in 1936 at the Art Alliance of Philadelphia and the
following year had his first one-man show, of watercolours, at the
Macbeth Gallery in New York, which sold out on the first day. In 1943
Wyeth received a lucrative offer to paint occasional covers for the Saturday Evening Post, as his father had done, but he refused, wishing to devote himself to more independent art.
Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009) remains one of the most popular
American painters of his time. His paintings, meticulously rendered,
convey a deep sympathy for people and a sense of the hardness and
brevity of life. 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." Further Reading 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. |
