Contact us at letters time. Previous Next. Alvaro and Christina, watercolor on paper from the Farnsworth Art Museum. By Liz Ronk. Already a print subscriber? Go here to link your subscription. A mail train from Philadelphia plowed into it, killing NC instantly and hurling little Newell onto the cinder embankment. He died of a broken neck. Wyeth joined him. The two found an old baby carriage, climbed into it together, and rolled down the hill, both of them laughing hysterically.
In Winter , Wyeth has said, the hill became the body of his father. He could almost feel it breathe. Most of a lung had to be removed. Trodden Weed , which Wyeth painted several weeks after the surgery—his hand supported by a sling suspended from the ceiling—depicts a pair of French cavalier boots in full stride across a landscape. The painting is both a kind of self-portrait and a meditation on the precariousness of life. By the time of his rehabilitation, Wyeth had achieved a signature look and a distinctive personal approach, finding nearly all of his subjects within a mile or so of the two towns in which he lived—Chadds Ford, where he still spends winters, and Cushing, Maine, where he goes in the summer.
But as the battle lines between realism and abstraction were drawn more rigidly in the mids, he was increasingly castigated as old-fashioned, rural, reactionary and sentimental. Then, in , Wyeth revealed the existence of sketches, studies, drawings and paintings many of them sensuous nudes of his married neighbor, Helga Testorf, who was 22 years his junior. He also let it be known that he had been working on the paintings for 15 years, apparently unbeknown even to his wife.
But the revelation was also seen as a hoax and publicity stunt. I was painting. And it took all my energy to paint. Sort of an apparition.
In any case, many in the New York art world seized upon the Helga paintings as confirmation of their belief that Wyeth was more cultural phenomenon than serious artist. I was born in Maine. I know these people and I know. Nothing about Wyeth is honest. He always goes back to that manicured desolation She notes that he tends to paint three subjects: still-life vignettes, vessels such as empty buckets and baskets , and thresholds views through windows and mysterious half-opened doors.
All three, she says, serve Wyeth as metaphors for the fragility of life. The paintings resonate with his highly personal symbolism. An invisible shadow. His painting Groundhog Day , for instance, appears to portray a cozy country kitchen.
The only cutlery on the table is a knife. Outside the window, a barbed-wire fence and jagged log wrapped in a chain dominate the landscape. Far from cozy, the painting suggests the violence and even madness that often simmers beneath the surface of daily life. Wyeth, Andrew Wyeth, James Wyeth.
Susan C. Betsy Wyeth points out N. Although this strategy aiming to pigeonhole Wyeth as an artist deeply rooted in a century-long tradition of American illustrators was highly counterproductive regarding academic and critical reception to his work, it raised awareness about the multifaceted nature of his art.
Figure 1. Howard Pyle, Her head and shoulders hung over the space without Figure 2. Howard Pyle, The Mermaid. Oil on canvas Delaware Art Museum. Then, the addition of diagonal patterns as a structural motif is striking in Then the real fight began Fig. In addition, the frequent use of curves as an alternate structural element, which can be observed in The gigantic monster dragged and hacked the headless corpse of his victim up the staircase Fig. To finish, the occasional use of very warm and intense colors, as in An Attack on a Galleon or Marooned , is a common defining trait of both the Pre-Raphaelites and Symbolist movements Fig.
Figure 3. Howard Pyle, An Attack on a Galleon. Jeanne Fox Friedman states that this paradox lies at the root of the Arts and Craft movement, 12 from which Pyle borrowed many concepts Elzea Friedman For Wyeth, only fine art painting could depict the larger truths embodied in nature. Nemerov Figure 4. Wyeth, Rounding Up. He started to experiment with a horizontal format, the contours became sharper—figures suddenly stood out against a flat curtain-like background—and he used a softer pastel color palette, even dark and ochre shades for night scenes.
Figure 5. Wyeth, The Ore Wagon. Source: westernartandarchitecture. Wyeth carefully selected each of the various stylistic options mentioned above, so as to make his images match the narratives he was supposed to illustrate, thus maximizing the need for efficiency required by his craft.
In his illustrations of Treasure Island in , he chose a very limited color palette, and dramatic Rembrandt-like light effects, as in The Black Spot Fig. Figure 6. Wyeth, The Black Spot. And finally, for The Last of the Mohicans in , we notice that he alternated different styles: American classicism in The Flight Across the Lake , stylized sharp shapes for the endpaper of the book Fig.
Wyeth theatrically transformed the cowboy into a rope-tossing David 20 to express his own kind of realism—a realism based less on appearances than essences. He analyses it more specifically in a painting called Gunfight Fig. Figure 7. Wyeth, Gunfight. Denver Art Museum.
Nemerov finds a similar technique in exterior scenes like in Fight on the Plains , for example. We could refer to numerous other examples like The Torrent in the Valley of Glencoe and The Death of Finnward Keelfarer in which the natural background setting is blurred so that the figures at the front of the image seem to jut out.
To finish, the endpaper of The Last of the Mohicans Fig. Furthermore, the trees in the foreground, cutting vertical stripes on the picture plane, and isolating the figures into parallel rectangles, create an even more elaborate frame-within-a-frame effect.
Figure 8. Wyeth, endpaper illustration of The Last of the Mohicans. Brandywine River Museum of Art. Figure 9. Tempera on panel Museum of Modern Art, New York, moma.
He also developed the same taste as his father for twilight or night scenes—for example, in Night Hauling Fig. Figure Andrew Wyeth. Night Hauling. Tempera on masonite This feature was essential to N. The desiccated hillside motif acquired a very personal meaning in his art, since he declared twice that it was a representation of his father. The fact that Andrew was often described as an outstanding technician 27 is worth mentioning. It operated quite outside the Impressionist exploration of retinal impressions and the avant-garde movements that followed, and instead rendered appearances with a hyper-realist fidelity impossible in nature, but which gives a heightened sense of the moment and the place depicted.
McNay Indeed, in s American culture, realism as an art form was progressively equated with political conservatism 31 and considered as a backward trend. This is the reason why many of his images have a defamiliarizing quality, despite their seemingly simple subjects. Andrew Wyeth, The Quaker. Collotype The opulence of the morning coat, with its fine green, blue and red stripes on a golden background, matching buttons, and pale pink lining, shimmering in a beam of light coming from the right-hand side of the picture, 34 stands in sharp contrast with the plainness of the Quaker coat, and the bare shadowy surroundings sanded floor, wooden window frame, walls painted in olive green, carved wood and brick fireplace.
Wyeth, for his part, seems to favor an aggregate of essences. Leafless and spidery branches bar the foreground view, and we notice a grid of tangled naked branches, in the background. The yellow grass is covered with patches of snow. The scene is bathed in a cold winter light, sharpening contours and contrast, which is opposed to the darkness of the hearth, gaping at the viewer, like an ominous black hole.
The stylistic tribute to Pyle is obvious. Illustration for Captain Scarfield Howard Pyle, Catherine Duke quickened her steps. Illustrating Mary E. The window on the left in The Quaker does not offer any interpretive clues, it merely enhances the pervading ominous feeling.
The shadow on the floor is the plain reflection of the frame; there is no hint of upcoming drama. The exhibition of old clothes, which belonged to Pyle, may be a subtle and melancholy way of portraying the illustrator, and his taste for theatricality—something which Wyeth himself shared.
Yet, the staging of the scene, the bare but intricate composition, show that Wyeth has been able to distance himself from the swashbuckling tales favored by Pyle to create his own specific atmosphere.
There are too many examples in his works since it was a quintessential part of his art, but we could mention two exemplary images, in which there is a complete focus on this aspect, such as Weatherside and Cooling Shed Fig. Andrew Wyeth, Cooling Shed. Philadelphia Museum of Art. We could mention the stone house and wall, in Catherine Duke quickened her steps Fig.
Howard Pyle, The gigantic monster dragged and hacked the headless corpse of his victim up the staircase. Moreover, architectural elements sometimes invade the whole picture plane and are treated as autonomous subject matters—for instance in Cooling Shed Fig. Andrew Wyeth, Groundhog Day. Syn and Break-up —betray an underlying reference to Pyle, and depict a haunted vision of himself, as a man, and as an artist. Andrew Wyeth, Trodden Weed. Tempera The Andrew and Betsy Wyeth Collection.
In , the artist had to undergo surgery, and during the operation, his heart stopped beating. Wyeth started forward; then pulled back. However, it had such a lasting effect on him that he pictured himself in a painting, wearing boots that had belonged to Pyle, and that he actually wore to take long, invigorating walks during his recovery period. Sharp contours outline the shape of the figure, which stands out on the background there is no chiaroscuro effect.
Wyeth focuses on the depiction of textures—leather, fabric, and dry grass have replaced silk, fur, and the myriad wisps of curly hair. The destructive gesture is symbolized by a horizontal black line, picturing a blade of grass crushed by one of the boots. The headless character, moving along and wearing old-fashioned knee-length boots, might stand for the relentless march of Thanatos. As far as the artist is concerned, it could be death itself, coming to get him in the guise of one of his favorite masters.
They might represent Wyeth himself, as an artist haunted by old masters. In Trodden Weed , Wyeth depicted himself as rising from the dead, his steps guided by the secular figure of Pyle—and not by God. To shoe equals to be : you should restitute the full consequence of that. Derrida Syn is another enigmatic self-portrait, staging more specifically the scopic drive this time Fig.
Wyeth admitted that this strange painting was a self-portrait 39 and he painted it in the aftermath of another surgical episode. Andrew Wyeth, Dr. On the right, a cannon is pointing towards the ocean through an opening in the wall. Wyeth gave some interesting information about Dr. Indeed, the skeleton motif was used differently by the Symbolists and the Surrealists.
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