January 16, 2009
Andrew Wyeth dies at 91
1.
The son of famed painter and book illustrator N.C. Wyeth, Andrew Wyeth gained wealth, acclaim and tremendous popularity. But he chafed under criticism from some experts who regarded him as a facile realist, not an artist but merely an illustrator.
“The world has lost one of the greatest artists of all time,” George A. Weymouth, a friend of Wyeth’s who is chairman of the board of the Brandywine Conservancy, said in a statement.
2.
“Really, I think one’s art goes only as far and as deep as your love goes,” Wyeth said in a Life magazine interview in 1965.
“I don’t paint these hills around Chadds Ford because they’re better than the hills somewhere else. It’s that I was born here, lived here — things have a meaning for me.”
Paradoxically, he said, he loved Maine “in spite of its scenery. There’s a lot of cornball in that state you have to go through — boats at docks, old fishermen, and shacks with swayback roofs. I hate all that.”
3.
“I do an awful lot of thinking and dreaming about things in the past and the future — the timelessness of the rocks and the hills — all the people who have existed there,” he once said. “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.
4.
N.C. Wyeth, the only art teacher Wyeth ever had, didn’t always agree with his son’s taste.
In a 1986 interview with the AP, Wyeth recalled one of the last paintings he showed to his father, who died in 1945. It was a picture of a young friend walking across a barren field.
“He said, ‘Andy, that has a nice feel, of a crisp fall morning in New England.’ He said, ‘You’ve got to do something to make this thing appeal. If you put a dog in it, or maybe have a gun in his hand,’” Wyeth recalled.
“Invariably my father talked about my lack of color.”
5.
The exhibition of the Helga paintings at the National Gallery of Art in Washington drew tens of thousands, but it renewed the dispute between Wyeth’s admirers and his equally passionate detractors.
Some critics dismissed Wyeth’s art as that of a mere “regionalist.” Art critic Hilton Kramer was even more direct, once saying, “In my opinion, he can’t paint.”
The late J. Carter Brown, who was for many years director of the National Gallery, called such talk “a knee-jerk reaction among intellectuals in this country that if it’s popular, it can’t be good.”
“I think the man’s mastery of a variety of techniques is dazzling, and I think the content is in many cases moving,” Brown said.
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