Andrew Wyeth Passed Away

Andrew Wyeth - Winter, 1946

Andrew Wyeth - a rural painter, a Realist among Contemporary artists.

Andrew Wyeth, who died today at the age of 91, gave America a prim and flinty view of Puritan rectitude, starchily sentimental, through parched gray and brown pictures of spooky frame houses, desiccated fields, deserted beaches, circling buzzards and craggy-faced New Englanders (Michael Kimmelman in NY Times).

The NY Times published an image of his Winter, painted in 1946. But it's Christina's World who remained his famous work: she was Christina Olson, a person who was invalid (stiff from waist down) and was living by herself fighting bravely with her condition.

Andrew Wyeth - Christina's World, 1948

So, there is a dramatic narrative behind this painting; we do not know the story, of course, but there is a tension there suggesting the drama: we see the back of the woman and we feel that she's looking intensely toward the house; we feel her intensity from the way she is turned and the way she is keeping her head.

Was Wyeth on all his works a Realist? Not exactly: we should look at his watercolors.

Let's take Benjamin's House: says Terry Teachout in Wall Street Journal, all narrative content has been stripped out of this bare, washy winter scene, leaving only the essentials: a wall, a window, a handful of branches. The result is a masterly little glimpse of the visible world, executed with self-effacing virtuosity.

Andrew Wyeth - Benjamin's House, 1955

Andrew Wyeth - Stop, 2008

Andrew Wyeth in the studio
photographer unknown, c. 1932
Courtesy of Wyeth Family Archives, ©
(source: Artists Network)
no copyright infringement intended

(Contemporary Art)