Andrew Newell Wyeth (surname Template:Pron-en;^[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.

One of the most well-known images in 20th-century American art is his painting, Christina's World, currently in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

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.

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.

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.

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. 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.^[7]

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.^[8]

The works were exhibited at the National Gallery of Art in 1987 and in a coast-to-coast tour.^[9] 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.

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.' "^[10] 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).^[11]

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."^[12]

Andrew Wyeth's work is in the collections of most major American museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Cincinnati Art Museum; the Museum of Modern Art in New York City; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the National Gallery of Art and the White House in Washington, DC; the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City; and the Arkansas Art Center in Little Rock. Especially large collections of Wyeth's art are held by the Brandywine River Museum in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania; the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, Maine; and the Greenville County Museum of Art in Greenville, South Carolina. A major retrospective of Andrew Wyeth's work was presented at the Philadelphia Museum of Art from March 29, 2006 to July 16, 2006.^[13]

Wyeth was the recipient of numerous honorary degrees.

• 2007, the National Medal of Arts.^[14]
• 1988, the Congressional Gold Medal,^[14] the highest civilian honor bestowed by the United States legislature.
• 1987, a D.F.A. from Bates College.
• 1980, the first living United States artist to be elected to Britain's Royal Academy.
• 1977, the first American artist since John Singer Sargent to be elected to the French Académie des Beaux-Arts.
• 1963, the first painter to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom.^[14]

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.^[15]

• Cartoonist Charles M. Schulz (a longtime admirer) often referred to Wyeth in his comic strip, Peanuts. ^[16]
• Fred Rogers, of the PBS television series Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, had a reproduction of a Wyeth painting in the entryof the studio "home".
• Tom Duffield, the production designer for the American remake of The Ring (2002), was inspired by Wyeth's paintings for the look of the film.
• M. Night Shyamalan based his movie The Village (2004) on paintings by Andrew Wyeth.^[17]
• The director Philip Ridley stated that his film The Reflecting Skin (1990) is inspired in its visual style by the paintings of Wyeth.
• The Helga series of paintings was the inspiration for the 1987 album Man of Colours by the Australian band Icehouse.
• In the 1990s television series Step by Step, Wyeth's painting Master Bedroom can be seen in the Fosters' living room.
• The Japanese television series Ashita No Kita Yoshio has main characters who are connected a book featuring Wyeth's work.
• In the "Springfield Up," 2007 episode of The Simpsons, Mr. Burns has a painting of Christina's World in his den, except he is pictured instead.

• Meryman, R.: Andrew Wyeth: A Secret Life, HarperCollins 1996. ISBN 0-06-017113-8.
• Meryman, Richard. '(May 1, 1998) 'Andrew Wyeth: A Secret Life. Paperback, 464 pages. Harper Collins Publishers ISBN 9780060929213; ISBN 0060929219.
• Meryman, Richard. (July, 1991) "The Wyeth Family: American Visions." National Geographic.
• Mongan, A.: Andrew Wyeth: Dry Brush And Pencil Drawings, Little Brown & Co (T) 1966. ISBN 0821201700.
• Wyeth, A.: Andrew Wyeth: Autobiography, by Thomas Hoving (Contributor), Andrew Wyeth (Contributor), Bulfinch Press 2007. ISBN 1568526547.
• "Andrew Wyeth: Self-Portrait - Snow Hill", authorized documentary, Chip Taylor Communications, 60 min, 1999, vhs ISBN 157192356X
• "Andrew Wyeth: Self-Portrait - Snow Hill", authorized documentary, Chip Taylor Communications, 60 min, 2003, dvd ISBN 1571925570
• "Andrew Wyeth: Autobiography" by Thomas Hoving (Contributor), Andrew Wyeth (Contributor)

• Tenants Harbor Light

• Autobiography by Andrew Wyeth, Bulfinch Press,USA ISBN 978- 0821222171

• Andrew Wyeth's website
• Brandywine River Museum
• Farnsworth Art Museum and Wyeth Center
• Smithsonian Magazine Article on Andrew Wyeth
• AP Obituary from the Philadelphia Inquirer
• Michael Kimmelman, Obituary, NY Times
• Genre Art Advocacy Center
• An account by Andrew Wyeth of his approach to painting in Life magazine, May 14, 1965

Galleries

• Andrew Wyeth at MuseumSyndicate
• Artnet — Andrew Wyeth
• Christina's World in the MoMA Online Collection
• President Bush's Statement on Death of Andrew Wyeth, January 16, 2009

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