An appreciation of Andrew Wyeth

Andrew Wyeth, one of the most popular American artists of the 20th century, died early yesterday at his home in Chadds Ford. The creator of such iconic paintings as

Christina's World

and

Wind From the Sea

was 91.

Mr. Wyeth died in his sleep, according to Hillary Holland, a spokeswoman for the Brandywine River Museum, where his work is always on display.

He was the most famous and successful artist in a remarkable family that produced five painters in three generations - but being popular was a mixed blessing. The public loved his work, but many critics and scholars considered him an illustrator like his father, N.C. Wyeth, rather than a major artist. His work was often characterized as sentimental, the critical kiss of death.

A retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in the spring of 2006, his last major museum exhibition, emphatically refuted this view. The show of 94 paintings and works on paper demonstrated that he was a keenly perceptive painter of ephemeral experiences such as dreams, feelings, sensations and omens. It confirmed that Wyeth, who continued to produce major works until recently, was a complex artist of formidable depth, imagination and technical adroitness.

Some years ago, an article in Newsweek described him as "a great illustrator but a minor painter," to which Mr. Wyeth replied, "Probably I am. What's wrong with that? It doesn't bother me any."

His unique aesthetic vision made critics uncomfortable because they could not easily pigeonhole him, and it probably misled many of his admirers. He appeared to be a realist who used common and easily understood visual language, yet his best paintings are complex amalgams of storytelling, symbolism, memory and deep emotion whose themes are not nearly as obvious as they might seem.

Much of Mr. Wyeth's art could function as illustration, yet on the whole it is hardly upbeat. Pictures such as

Christina's World

- which may be the best-known image produced by an American in the 20th century - suggest distance, emptiness, loneliness and desolation. The dark, somber aspect of Mr. Wyeth's art has been its most prominent feature since the mid-1940s, although it has not always been acknowledged.

The paintings also confirm that Mr. Wyeth was an introspective, private man, a quality he developed as a child. He was never part of the mainstream art world, nor did he care to be. The world in which he lived and worked, and from which he drew inspiration, was tightly circumscribed; it consisted of Chadds Ford and Cushing, Maine, where he spent summers, and of his family, friends and neighbors.

While his art is very much tied to specific places and people, he usually tried to convey universality and timelessness in whatever he painted. For example,

Christina's World

depicts a person and a house in Maine that he knew intimately, but it is neither a portrait of the woman nor a landscape; it's a psychological construct.

This is true even of the so-called "Helga" pictures, which caused Mr. Wyeth and his wife, Betsy, considerable discomfort in the spring and summer of 1986. For 15 years beginning in 1970, he had worked with a model named Helga Testorf, a German immigrant who lived near him in Chadds Ford.

During that time, he made nearly 250 paintings and drawings of her, many of them nudes. The disclosure of the "Helga suite" caused a sensation because supposedly no one except Mr. Wyeth and his model, not even his wife, knew of this protracted relationship.

The story of the reclusive artist and his "secret" model, which made the covers of Time and Newsweek in the same week of August 1986, generated considerable gossip. Mr. Wyeth was said to have told his wife about the paintings when he was seriously ill and in fear of dying, but this turned out to be a rumor. She, it was said, in a jealous pique ordered that they be sold.

For whatever reason, they

were

sold, to the entrepreneur Leonard E.B. Andrews, for a sum that neither side would disclose, though it was speculated to be between $6 million to $7 million.

Andrews parlayed his collection, which he repeatedly characterized as "a national treasure," into a major traveling exhibition, organized by the National Gallery of Art, and a book. In late 1989, he sold the "national treasure" to a Japanese collector for a sum reported to be in excess of $40 million. In late 2005 it was sold again, to an anonymous American buyer for an undisclosed price.

Mr. Wyeth was not the first artist to have spent years drawing and painting one model, but no other artist has ever been so closely scrutinized for doing so.

Although the connection was overlooked at the time in the furious media scramble for scandal, his relationship with Testorf affirmed two long-standing interests - painting the human figure, which by itself made him unusual among contemporary artists, and a fascination with German and Prussian culture, which he said he acquired from his maternal grandmother.

Another German immigrant, the Chadds Ford farmer Karl Kuerner, inspired Mr. Wyeth to create an extended body of paintings and watercolors. Some were portraits, but many were typical of him in the way they focused on a building, a view from a window, or the landscape.

Throughout his career, Mr. Wyeth sought to reveal the uncommon or the unobserved in the ordinary. He looked for the ominous, or even the horrible, among the benign. In this regard, his work recalls the symbolists, active in Europe in the late 19th century, who created images designed not to describe but to stimulate emotions.

His unusual childhood certainly would have reinforced any natural proclivity to interpret the world through his imagination. Even though he had four siblings, he seems to have grown up as a solitary child who enjoyed a fairytale childhood.

Andrew Newell Wyeth was born in Chadds Ford on July 12, 1917, son of the noted illustrator Newell Convers Wyeth and Carolyn Brenneman Bockius Wyeth. The youngest of their five children, he had been preceded, in order of age, by Henriette, Carolyn, Nathaniel and Ann.

Henriette and Carolyn also became painters and married artists (Peter Hurd and John McCoy, respectively), and Ann became a composer; Nathaniel was an engineer and inventor. All are deceased.

N.C. Wyeth, as he was known, had moved to the Brandywine Valley to study illustration with Howard Pyle. He eventually became just as famous, particularly for illustrating such literary classics as

Treasure Island

and

The Last of the Mohicans

.

N.C. Wyeth encouraged his children to observe the world around them closely and to indulge their imaginations, which they often did by dressing up in the costumes he kept in his studio. "It was the most imaginative, rich childhood you could ever want," Mr. Wyeth recalled. "That's why I have so much inside of me that I want to paint."

Because of chronic sinus problems, young Andrew did not attend public school but was educated at home by tutors. With his father constantly around as a role model, he began to draw as a child. He was a natural talent, and by the age of 15, when N.C. formally took him into his studio as a student, he was already an accomplished draftsman.

The apprenticeship, which ended when he was 17, was his only formal instruction. As he once observed: "I feel that I became an artist out of the life that I led, things that appealed to me and really excited me, and then I began to paint."

When he left his father's tutelage, he was working mainly in watercolor; his first two exhibitions, at the Philadelphia Art Alliance in 1936 and at the Macbeth Gallery in New York City the following year, were entirely in that medium. He was an immediate success; his New York show sold out by the end of the second day.

Watercolor remained a primary medium throughout his career. In the late 1930s his brother-in-law, Hurd, taught him to paint in egg tempera, which until the 15th century was the most common medium for easel pictures. It's a demanding medium; the pigments, mixed with egg yolk thinned with water, dry quickly, so reworking is difficult.

An artist who employs this technique uses small brushes to make tiny strokes, which results in a smooth, seamless picture surface. This suited him perfectly; as he once explained, "My aim is to escape from the medium with which I work, to leave no residue of technical mannerism to stand between my expression and the observer."

Despite his intention, Mr. Wyeth's clean and precise style, complemented by a subdued earth-tone palette, became as distinctive as his fingerprints. It also inspired a host of followers, particularly among watercolorists.

The Wyeth family began to summer in Maine in 1927, at Port Clyde on the west side of Penobscot Bay. On his 22d birthday in 1939, Mr. Wyeth met Betsy Merle James, the daughter of a newspaper editor. They were married on May 15, 1940, and had two sons, Nicholas, an art dealer, and James, known as Jamie, who also is a well-known painter.

Betsy Wyeth has helped her husband to manage his career for more than a half-century. It was she who introduced him to Christina Olson, the woman portrayed in

Christina's World

and, like Kuerner, one of his favorite subjects.

By the age of 25, Andrew Wyeth was recognized as a talented fine artist, an ambition that N.C. - his professional and spiritual anchor - would never fulfill. Then, at 28, his world crumbled when his father was killed. On Oct. 19, 1945, N.C. was driving with his young grandson, Newell, when his car stalled on a railroad crossing near his home in Chadds Ford and was struck by a train.

"When he died, I was just a clever watercolorist - lots of swish and swash," Mr. Wyeth told Life writer Richard Meryman in 1965. After the accident, he resolved to honor his father's memory by "doing something serious" with his career.

"I had always had this great motion toward the landscape, and so, with his death . . . the landscape took on a meaning, the quality of him," he told Meryman.

The following year, he completed

Winter 1946

, a painting that, like

Christina's World

, has become one of his signature images. The picture, of a boy running down a hill, was a catharsis, for it allowed him to work out the remorse he felt for never having painted his father's portrait.

"The hill finally became a portrait of him," he said in the Life interview. The crossing where N.C. died was just on the other side of the hill.

From that time forward, Mr. Wyeth's art became identified equally with the Brandywine Valley around Chadds Ford and with Maine. The Wyeths divided each year between the places. Their homestead in Chadds Ford consists of an 18th-century miller's house, a gristmill converted to a studio, and a granary used as an office. In Cushing, just west of Port Clyde on the Maine coast, they have a restored 18th-century clapboard house. They also own a small island off the coast.

For Mr. Wyeth, the Pennsylvania countryside meant solid stone walls and soggy, rich earth; by contrast, Maine seemed to him "all dry bones and desiccated sinews." But Maine also appealed to him because it represented a simplicity he believed was disappearing in America.

Although Mr. Wyeth was a famous artist for years, his friends and neighbors in each place shielded him from tourists and the idly curious who hoped to drop into his studio or find him painting outdoors. Anyone who made casual inquiries about Wyeth was likely to be put off with protestations of ignorance about his whereabouts or vague directions that led nowhere in particular.

Some of these friends and neighbors have become famous themselves because of Mr. Wyeth. Olson was a crippled woman who lived with her brother in a weatherbeaten house on a coastal promontory. The artist painted her and their house many times; for him, her pride, quiet courage and independent spirit epitomized what he loved about the state.

Another Maine neighbor, a teenaged Finnish girl named Siri Erickson, became the subject of his first nudes, beginning in 1969. Where Olson symbolized deterioration, Erickson represented the invigoration and power of youth. Ralph Cline, a 71-year-old Maine lumberman whom Mr. Wyeth observed marching in a Memorial Day parade, became

The Patriot

, painted in a bemedaled World War I uniform. One of his most striking images depicts another Maine friend, Walt Anderson, lying in a dory that seems adrift and looking like a modern-day Viking being buried at sea.

Mr. Wyeth did not begin to concentrate on painting people until after his father died. In Chadds Ford, his principal subject was Kuerner, the former German army machine-gunner who had become a Pennsylvania dairy farmer. He had known the Kuerner farm since childhood, and some observers have speculated that Kuerner, who died in 1979, became a surrogate father.

His pictures of Kuerner and his farm add up to a collective portrait that is frequently symbolic in its allusions. For instance,

Groundhog Day

, painted in 1959 (and in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art), is a view out a window in Kuerner's kitchen. A plate, knife, and cup and saucer are on the table; otherwise the sunlit room is empty.

Through the window, one can see the jagged ends of a cut log, the kind of menacing detail that Mr. Wyeth often included in his compositions to avoid what he called "sweetness." Although Kuerner is not present, Mr. Wyeth intended that this picture should suggest his character - spartan, honest, perhaps a bit flinty.

And finally there was Testorf, the buxom secret model who had once worked for Kuerner and then for the artist's sister Carolyn. The "Helga" pictures comprised Mr. Wyeth's last extended body of work, and the major show that opened at the National Gallery of Art in 1987 traveled to six other museums.

Mr. Wyeth's first solo exhibition in a museum came exactly 30 years after his show at the Art Alliance. The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts mounted a retrospective in 1966 that traveled to the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Another retrospective followed in 1970, at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Museum of Modern Art, which owns

Christina's World

, gave him a show in 1971. In 1976, he became the first living U.S. artist to receive a retrospective exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a show called "Two Worlds of Andrew Wyeth: Kuerners and Olsons." His show at the Royal Academy of Arts in London was the first there by a living U.S. artist.

The Brandywine River Museum in Chadds Ford is often called "the Wyeth museum," though no Wyeths have any formal connection with it. But the Brandywine features Andrew's work and that of his father and his son; a representative group of Andrew's paintings fill a large gallery in an addition that opened in September 1984.

James H. Duff, executive director of the museum, said last night that it would mount a Wyeth retrospective in the near future.

The year 1987 was a banner year for Wyeth; besides the "Helga" exhibition, "Three Generations of Wyeth Art," which featured work by N.C., Andrew and Jamie, began an American tour after opening to large crowds in Leningrad and Moscow. The show eventually went around the world, to museums in Tokyo, Milan and Cambridge, England.

Mr. Wyeth did not make his first trip to Europe until 1977, when he was inducted into the French Academy of Fine Arts - the first American artist since John Singer Sargent to be so honored. The Soviet Academy of Arts made him an honorary member in 1979, and he became an official member in 1986.

Wyeth was honored repeatedly by U.S. presidents. In 1963, John F. Kennedy made him the first artist to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 1970, Richard M. Nixon arranged a private exhibition of his paintings in the White House; he was the first living artist to be so honored.

In 1990 George H.W. Bush awarded him the Congressional Gold Medal, marking the first time the honor had been given to an artist, and in 2007 George W. Bush presented him with the National Medal of the Arts for "a lifetime of paintings whose meticulous realism have captured the American consciousness."

Mr. Wyeth was the youngest person ever elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the National Institute of Arts and Letters (1955), which gave him a gold medal "for preeminence in painting" in 1965, and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1960).

The Academy of the Fine Arts gave him its Gold Medal of Honor in 1966 and again in 1998. And in 1986, Pennsylvania Gov. Dick Thornburgh named him the state's Distinguished Artist, describing him as "a true living treasure."

Services will be private. Donations may be made to the Farnsworth Art Museum, 16 Museum St., Rockland, Maine 04841, or to the Brandywine River Museum, Box 141, Chadds Ford, Pa. 19317.