Celebrating the Passing of a Grand Curmudgeon
In Memoriam: American Existential Artist and Andrew Wyeth
... who summered for 89 years on the Maine coast but lived each of his 91 years in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, 19 miles up scenic but winding back roads with no shoulder through dense woods from our Delaware residence.
After 'Andy' passed away quietly in his sleep on January 16, Christopher Orlet wrote in "American Spectator" ...
I will admit it -- I have three Andrew Wyeth prints in my home. Whether this is proof of my philistinism, my penury, or what, I leave others to judge.
I chuckled because his 'Cold Spring, Sisters, and Bermuda. hang in my family room, his son Jamie's painting (that I once knew the name of) of a tilted back rustic chair with a wicker seat and adorned by a straw bonnet with blue ribbons streaming graces our dining room. and a print of his dad N.C. Wyeth's Island Funeral 1939 Egg tempera and oil on hardboard painting owned by Wilmington's Hotel Du Pont hangs in my entertainment room. They're all out of print and worth considerably more than we originally paid (the one below in particular).
'Bermuda' a water of Eli's Harbor near the ferry stop in SouthHampton between the Port Royal Golf course and the Maritime Museum was his only painting done on that island, and while unsigned bootlegged copied prints are available today for a song, originally it was only available in an antique and map shop a half mile walk up a hill from downtown Hamilton. About 15 ago on one of our several visits to the island, Sheila and I trudged up the hill, spent several hours in the rustic shop, and departed with the carefully flat packaged pencil signed print as well as a real treasure of a map by local treasure diver Teddy Tucker of the island surrounded by its shipwrecks already framed in Bermuda teak, which also hangs in our family room ...
Below is a link N.C. Wyeth's Island Funeral which knocked me out with its vibrant splash of color when I 1st saw the original and I searched for several years to find a reasonably priced high quality print before accidentally stumbling over one in a bin at a local frame shop ...
tinyurl.com
The five Wyeth's we own were all framed tastefully under protective glass locally, and four of our five prints were all purchased at the Brandywine River Museum in Chadds Ford which houses or displays on loan much of Andy's (Jamie's and N.C's) work ...
brandywinemuseum.org
Funeral services were held privately, but a public memorial service and celebration of the artist’s life and work is being held there today at the Brandywine River Museum.
delawareonline.com
delcotimes.com
The museum parking lot often overflows on a normal Saturday much less on holiday weekends but the museum is geared up for extremely large crowds this weekend by having extra staff, greeters and volunteers on hand. A crew will direct traffic in the museum's parking lot, but no additional spaces will be available. Spokeswoman Lora Englehart advised visitors to "get here early" and "be flexible."
We've made the pilgrimage to the museum perhaps 20 times since we've resided in Delaware, and it's a favorite stop for our 2 daughters who grew up with Wyeths and whose homes also house Wyeth art, when they visit us. For those that visit the Valley Forge area I'd highly recommend a 30 minute jaunt down to the museum, and a self-guided tour through Eric Miller's nearby Chadds Ford Winery ...
chaddsford.com
My Charles Schwab broker holds one or 2 seminars each year at the winery, and I seldom skip them. Eric is a real character, and another area curmudgeon, who vints wine because he "likes to drink wine" and he often conducts the winery tour himself and we taste from several barrels along the way before the upstairs tasting of some of his best bottled finished product.
>> Wyeth's Death Reignites Debate Over His Legacy
Although some critics deride his art as drab and kitschy, Andrew Wyeth's melancholy paintings were praised by others as profound reflections of 20th Century alienation and existentialism.
Maryclaire Dale (Philadelphia)
Associated Press
tinyurl.com
Although some critics deride his art as drab and kitschy, Andrew Wyeth's melancholy paintings were praised by others as profound reflections of 20th Century alienation and existentialism.
Wyeth, who focused on the people and landscapes of Pennsylvania's Brandywine Valley and coastal Maine in works such as "Christina's World," died in his sleep at his Philadelphia-area home early Friday. He was 91.
The death of Wyeth - the most famous member of the three-generation family art dynasty - will likely rekindle the debate over his contribution to American art.
"The squabbling is kind of art-world politics over who owns modernism," said curator Kathleen Foster of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, who helped assemble the last major retrospective of his work at the museum in 2006.
Wyeth's pictures express for many the alienation of 20th century life and art, she said. Yet critics in the 1950s assailed him as a provincial reactionary next to New York abstract painters Jackson Pollock and William de Kooning.
"As we get farther from his work, we're going to recognize that he's just a different voice of modernism," Foster said. "This kind of quarreling over his status is going to fade, and he will be recognized as a great, great American artist."
Wyeth died at his home in suburban Chadds Ford, Pa., after a brief illness, according to Jim Duff, director of the Brandywine River Museum.
The son of famed painter and book illustrator N.C. Wyeth and the father of painter Jamie Wyeth, Andrew Wyeth gained wealth, acclaim and tremendous popularity during his lengthy art career.
Still, some critics viewed him as a facile realist, not an artist but merely an illustrator.
"One critic has called Wyeth the greatest living kitschmeister, while others have compared him to Edward Hopper or the Abstract Expressionists," said Milton Esterow, the editor and publisher of Artnews, which lavishly praised Wyeth's work in the 1950s but has since stayed on the sidelines. "I think the jury is still out."
The public voiced no such complaints, embracing his work over half a century and turning out in record numbers for the 2006 exhibit in Philadelphia.
The Brandywine River Museum in Chadds Ford, a converted 19th-century grist mill, includes hundreds of works by three generations of Wyeths.
"He was a man who had a deep understanding of the human condition," Duff said. "The world is a beautiful place but the world holds many threats."
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 intimate portraits that brought him millions of dollars and a wave of public attention in 1986.
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.
Wyeth's world was as limited in scale, and as rich in associations, as "Christina's World," which shows a disabled woman looking up a grassy rise toward her farm home, her face tantalizingly unseen.
"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.
Wyeth remained active in recent years and President George W. Bush presented him with a National Medal of the Arts in 2007.
"Laura and I deeply mourn the death of American painter, Andrew Wyeth," President Bush said in a statement.
His granddaughter, Victoria Wyeth, told The Associated Press in 2008 that he no longer gave interviews. "He says, 'Vic, everything I have to say is on the walls,'" she said.
Wyeth was born July 12, 1917, in Chadds Ford, the youngest of N.C. Wyeth's five children. One of his sisters, Henriette, who died in 1997, also became an artist of some note, and one of his two sons, Jamie, became a noted painter in his own right. His other son, Nicholas, became an art dealer.
In 1987-88, a traveling exhibit of works by N.C., Andrew and Jamie was seen by thousands in cities around the world.
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."
The low-key colors that made up his palette - which art critic Dave Hickey described as mere "mud and baby poop" - stem partly from his frequent use of tempera, a technique he began using in 1942. Unlike the oil paint used by most artists today, tempera produces a matte effect.
Wyeth had his first success at age 20, with an exhibition of Maine landscapes at a gallery in New York. Two years later he met his future wife, Betsy James.
Betsy Wyeth was a strong influence on her husband's career, serving as his business agent, keeping the world at bay and guiding his career choices.
It was Betsy who introduced Wyeth to Christina Olson. Wyeth befriended the disabled old woman and her brother, and practically moved in with them for a series of studies of the house, its environs and its occupants.
The acme of that series was "Christina's World," painted in 1948. It was Olson's house, but the figure was Betsy Wyeth. Wyeth is survived by his wife and two sons. ###
Anne Fabbri once called Andy America’s most overrated artist and opened a long critique with this paragraph ...
If you want to make a sure fire-bet for your heirs to collect, just wager on Andrew Wyeth’s future reputation as an artist. A hundred years from now his paintings will be gathering dust in the storage bins of any institution unfortunate enough to have acquired them. The only requests to view them will come from quirky academics in psychology or history trying to decipher the oddities of 20th Century culture, specifically how and why a mediocre artist specializing in banalities became an icon for America’s middle classes.
As for his numerous critics, a local scribe wrote last week ...
A critic once accused Wyeth's work of "sticky sentimentality." Clearly, he never lived here.
Sheila and I will visit the Brandywine in a few weeks when crowds subside and we are tentatively planning a late spring or early fall trip home to the NH seacoast and when we do we are also hoping to drive up the Maine coast to lunch on clam or lobster rolls and visit the new $5 million 'Center for the Wyeth Family' at the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland which itself houses 3 generations of Wyeth along with some of Betsy's paintings.
Please excuse the length of this rambling post with its numerous personal reminisces but its part of the beginning of my own celebration of 'Andy's' life and work and also Sheila's and my fondness for the New England coast and Bermuda, its marvelous year round climate, its golf. its occasional sand beaches on a primarily rock coast, it's dining, its shopping, its accommodations, and most of all its people.
I'm also hopeful that one or two cumudgeons that check in here are suburban Philadelphia area loboy's and/or Andy Wyeth fans and can enjoy a few of the links I provided.
The Iggles bit the dust and have cleaned out the locker room at the Linc so Go Steelers!
Best to all,
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