Wyeth's Attitude to the Public

Andrew Wyeth is featured quite well by the New York Times through this slide show at this link soon after his death on 16 January 2009. Check also Andrew Wyeth: Self-Portrait - Snow Hill

He lost a lung, survived a near-fatal illness, and had a hip operation, but kept working, energized partly by disdain for his detractors. “I’m not going to let them disrupt my old age,” he said.

“I am an example of publicity — a great deal of it,” he also said. “I’m grateful because it gives me the freedom to go and try to do better. But I never had any great idea that these people are understanding what I’m doing. And they don’t.”

Wyeth added: “Let’s be sensible about this. I put a lot of things into my work which are very personal to me. So how can the public feel these things? I think most people get to my work through the back door. They’re attracted by the realism and they sense the emotion and the abstraction — and eventually, I hope, they get their own powerful emotion.”

"I think one's art goes only as far and as deep as your love goes," he said in an interview.
"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," Wyeth added of his home town.

"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 said.

In 2007, he received the National Medal of Arts from President George W Bush and became the first artist to be granted the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Wyeth's Models

Wyeth was a controversial figure. Known by some as America's greatest living artist in his later years, others simply called him a fraud. Odd that such strong emotions were elicited by the work of a man who made his life engaged in a solitary pursuit.

He endured -- and worked -- into the 21st century, but he always will be associated with the 20th century, a time of expansion and upheaval in the art world.

Helga

Wyeth plugged along painting trees, barns, animals and people. What the critics who so harshly attack or dismiss his work miss is that the works were not about just the tree or the person. They were about his relationship to the object or person, but had universal overtones that go with the privilege of individual viewer interpretation.

A hillside could be his father. A woman could be a compilation of three different models. He was not a realist fitting the obvious definition of the word. He created abstraction from something you could recognize.

His themes progressed over the years and grew from circumstances in his life. His Christina Olson works, epitomized by his best known painting, "Christina's World," became a series about decay and death, as he painted her as she aged and became unable to care for herself or her home.

After Ms. Olson died, Wyeth started painting a 14-year-old girl named Siri Erickson, and those works -- mostly nudes, so he kept them secret until she was of age -- became about rebirth, renewal, innocence, beauty.

When Siri was no longer available -- a boyfriend reportedly refused to let her pose for Wyeth anymore -- he painted Helga Testorf, and their relationship became one of absolute trust. He could paint what he wanted of her without her flinching. He could look within himself and eliminate any self-established boundaries.

I believe Wyeth will always get a bad rap in art history classes because he eschewed 20th-century art movements and followed his own vision, one that happened to be enormously successful.

The Helga Pictures by Andrew Wyeth

For 15 years, America's most popular living artist worked in secret with neighbor Helga Testorf as model. The resultsome 240 pencil sketches, watercolors, drybrush, and temperas, concerned with Helga in all aspects, nude and clothedare here shown in 100 high-quality color plates and 160 black and white illustrations. Works in progress reveal the artist's methods; finished works, an obsession with his model as awesome as his technique. Wilmerding, deputy director of the National Gallery, contributes an informative text, further clarified by the artist's own observations. Gloria K. Rensch, formerly with Vigo Cty. P.L., Terre Haute, Ind. Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The Helga Paintings

The "Helga" paintings, many of them full-figure nudes, came with a whiff of scandal: Wyeth said he had not even told his wife, Betsy, about the more than 200 paintings and sketches until he had completed them in 1985.

Braids - 1979
"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.

A Wyeth retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2006 drew more than 175,000 visitors in 15 1/2 weeks, the highest-ever attendance at the museum for a living artist. The Brandywine River Museum in Chadds Ford, a converted 19th-century grist mill, includes hundreds of works by three generations of Wyeths.

It was in Maine that Wyeth found the subject for "Christina's World," his best-known painting. And it was in Pennsylvania that he met Helga Testorf, a neighbor in his native Chadds Ford who became the subject of the intimate portraits that brought him millions of dollars and a wave of public attention in 1986.

Day Dream - 1980

My favorite painting in the Helga series is certainly Day Dream painted in 1980.

Andrew Wyeth died at 91 - (1917-2009)

Andrew Wyeth, who was an icon of American painting, has passed away on Friday 16th January at the age of 91. He was a controversial painter who generated a lot of media interest during his lifetime. See his Obituary at the Philadelphia Enquirer and the New York Times.





He portrayed the hidden melancholy of the people and landscapes of Pennsylvania's Brandywine Valley and coastal Maine in works such as "Christina's World."



These are some quotes of Andrew Wyeth:

• Artists today think of everything they do as a work of art. It is important to forget about what you are doing - then a work of art may happen.
  
• At 18 I began painting steadily fulltime and at age 20 had my first New York show at the Macbeth Gallery.
  
• I can't work completely out of my imagination. I must put my foot in a bit of truth; and then I can fly free.
  
• I don't really have studios. I wander around around people's attics, out in fields, in cellars, anyplace I find that invites me.
• I dream a lot. I do more painting when I'm not painting. It's in the subconscious.
  
• I love to study the many things that grow below the corn stalks and bring them back to the studio to study the color. If one could only catch that true color of nature - the very thought of it drives me mad.
  
• I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape - the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn't show.
  
• I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape. Something waits beneath it; the whole story doesn't show.
  
• I search for the realness, the real feeling of a subject, all the texture around it... I always want to see the third dimension of something... I want to come alive with the object.
  
• I surrendered to a world of my imagination, reenacting all those wonderful tales my father would read aloud to me. I became a very active reader, especially history and Shakespeare.
  
• I'm a secretive bastard. I would never let anybody watch me painting... it would be like somebody watching you have sex - painting is that personal to me.
  
• If you clean it up, get analytical, all the subtle joy and emotion you felt in the first place goes flying out the window.
  
• It's a moment that I'm after, a fleeting moment, but not a frozen moment.
  
• It's all in how you arrange the thing... the careful balance of the design is the motion.
  
• One's art goes as far and as deep as one's love goes.
  
• To be interested solely in technique would be a very superficial thing to me.
  
• To have all your life's work and to have them along the wall, it's like walking in with no clothes on. It's terrible.