Stlukesguild

RIP Andrew Wyeth
July 12, 1917 – January 16, 2009

(I've re-posted this with some small editing from an earlier posting on Wyeth)

In art it is often true that living long is one of the best guarantees of one achieving something of real merit. It is rare to come across artists who reach their maturity much before their late twenties at the earliest... although there are exceptions. Artists like Titian, Rembrandt, Monet, Beckmann, and many more created their greatest works late in life... and the same may be true of more contemporary artists such as Balthus and Lucian Freud. Producing a large body of consistent work is also something of a guarantee of one's eventually being recognized. Certainly, such was true of Andrew Wyeth... who until his death January 16th at the age of 91, was perhaps America's greatest living "realist"... if not America's greatest living artist.

Wyeth was the son of the great illustrator, N.C. Wyeth, and studied well under his father's tutelage. Unfortunately, Wyeth came of age at an era in which "realism" was on the wane and Abstract Expressionism had come into the forefront. Wyeth, nevertheless, continued upon his way... creating endless realistic paintings of the people, places and things which surrounded him in his rural Pennsylvania and Maine dwellings. As such he was often relegated by certain cliques of the "art world" to the realm of "regionalist painter". He was dismissed by some as even more of an anachronism as a result of his use of such older, "outdated" means of working such as dry-brush and egg-tempera. Even until the present there are certain camps of the art world that still underestimate Wyeth... denegrating his work as "populist"..."sentimental"... even "kitsch".

The reality is that there is an incredible strength in his work. His sense of composition is powerful, dramatic, and simple... but never "simplistic". His handling of paint was unsurpassed in many ways. He was a master of the brush. His watercolors, gouache, and "dry-brush" paintings are among some of the greatest ever produced in the media... his calligraphic brushwork recalling Chinese and Japanese painters, the works of Albrecht Dürer, and even the ink wash drawings of Rembrandt. His egg-tempera paintings are a marvel... his building up of layers upon layers of egg tempera often create surfaces as variegated as anything by Pollack.

While his subject matter and painting vocabulary are certainly traditional and uniquely American, his works are in no way sentimental, nor do they pander to some romantic notion of an Arcadian rural Americana... rather, they resonate with a chord not far removed from that of Edward Hopper... but more Puritan... with an ever-present intimation of death. Looking at his paintings I have always thought of the poetry of Dickinson and Robert Frost... and the tales of Hawthorne.

Wyeth was emphatically clear about his roots and repeatedly stated that while he admired the great sensual European painters (Rubens, Titian, Velasquez, etc...) he felt a far greater affinity with the starker works of Albrecht Dürer and the artist of the early Renaissance whom he imagined as having a greater compatibility with the Puritan nature of the North-East American experience:

Wyeth often presents images of stark interiors or exteriors that suggest a human presence... which is yet absent from sight. In many ways his work echoed that of the great Danish painter, Wilhelm Hammerschoi:



In even the most sentimental/romantic subjects there is an emptiness... a starkness... a blanching of life... a suggestion of death:



In a great majority of his paintings the human presence is but hinted at by the human dwelling space. Animals... plants... inanimate objects often act as stand-ins for the missing persons:







In this magnificent painting the frailest wisp of a lace curtain is the only real sign of life as it catches the play of light and swirls in the wind:





There is something almost Hawthorne-like to this above painting. The clothes suggest a dichotomy of male and female... as well as the secular (the light night shirt) and spiritual/religious (in the brooding greatcoat that call to my mind a world out of Young Goodman Brown.

Even when Wyeth included the presence of actual persons there is a sense of distance. We don't see anything of Helga (Wyeth's probable lover as well as model) except for her rigorous and tightly braided hair:



His most iconic painting, Christina's World is often imagined in satire or parody as something of a romantic image of a sensual woman laying in a New England field. The reality is anything but. It presents rather a somewhat unsettling image of a rather famished-looking and crippled woman crawling along the barren ground toward a house that appears far beyond her reach:



Even Wyeth's nudes lack any sensuality... any Mediterranean revelry in the pleasures of the flesh... any real electric eroticism. Rather they retain a certain Puritan nature:



He will be sorely missed.