Andrew Wyeth, probably the most significant painter of the 20th century in the United States, gathered many people in the art world to praise him as he died on Friday at his home in Chadds Ford, Pa.
Together with his father N.C. Wyeth and his son Jamie Wyeth, the 91-year-old artist was part of a dynasty of celebrated painters whom most critics considered as illustrators during an era when the visual arts crackled with experimentation.
Andrew Wyeth was born on the 12th of July 1917 and was the youngest of all five children of the family. His father, Newell Convers Wyeth who had become famous as an illustrator of popular literary classics was the one who provided for him formal training.
Because of his respiratory problems, Andrew Wyeth had been educated at home, which is why his father’s influence in his development came naturally and eased by the boy’s native drawing talent.
He became the kind of painter who preferred to work in tempera, a resistant medium that most of his contemporaries regarded as obsolete. Therefore, Kathleen A. Foster, the senior curator of American art and director of the Center for American Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, stated: “There is no question that there has been a polarization of opinion” concerning Wyeth and his work.
Mr. Wyeth's first New York gallery show took place in 1936 and provided immediate success for the artist, but it was not until after his father’s death in 1945 that the painter claimed to have taken his artistic potential seriously. After the emergence of Jackson Pollock and other abstractionists, he was deemed old-fashioned, even if his paintings continued to sell and be admired by personalities like Winston Churchill.
With help from his brother-in-law, Peter Hurd, who was a prominent illustrator, Mr. Wyeth learned the technique of painting in egg tempera which made him feel like he had a connection with the Northern Renaissance masters, such as Albrecht Dürer, the realist painters he admired the most. He also became a great admirer of Edward Hopper, another American realist, and was even compared to him, although most of the times in a negative way.
The climax of Wyeth’s celebrity and the strongest criticisms of it too, happened in 1988 when the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco hosted the widely circulated exhibition, "Andrew Wyeth: The Helga Pictures." There were dozens of portraits, including many nudes, of a favorite model that Mr. Wyeth had reputedly kept secret from his wife. Betsy Wyeth, almost 68 now, successfully managed the business of her husband’s career for decades. Admiration of Mr. Wyeth's obvious technical skills caused the exhibition to attract huge crowds at all of its venues.
The same happened in1998, as the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York presented "Unknown Terrain: The Landscapes of Andrew Wyeth."
The last substantial show of Mr. Wyeth's work, "Andrew Wyeth: Magic and Memory" took place at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2006 and represented the painter’s estimation of his achievement. The show mostly exhibited tempera paintings, portraits, as well as aspects of mood, narrative and symbolism which were also prevailed.
Andrew Wyeth was lucky to live long enough to see taste among critics shift toward a more measured and balanced view of him and his work. Therefore, among many honors, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and received the Gold Medal of Honor from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.
