Word: artful
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...true that the discoveries of Picasso and Pollock don't much ruffle the grave surfaces of Wyeth's work. For much of his career he painted not only in watercolors but in tempera, a pigment and egg-white medium that predates oil paint. His only art school was the Chadds Ford home he grew up in. His father was the greatly gifted illustrator N.C. Wyeth, whose thronged imaginings of scenes from Treasure Island and The Last of the Mohicans made him rich and famous. He decided early on that his talented son should also be an illustrator...
...draughtsman - and maybe also as a showman - are owed to his boisterous, demanding father. But the quiet and spareness of his pictures, the sense of longing and abandonment, of having exacted the maximum effect from the minimum means, may be a reaction against his father's swashbuckling art. His father also marked Wyeth's life strongly in one other way. In 1945 the elder Wyeth, along with his 4-year-old grandson by Andrew's brother Nat, was killed when his car stalled on a railroad track. It was an event that Wyeth's biographer, Richard Meryman, says split Wyeth...
...Whatever the reason, there's a spareness and gravity in Wyeth's art after World War II that would be his trademark for the rest of his career. His landscapes are more astringent and cooler. His portraits too. The people in those portraits are known to him. Most of them are family, like his son Jamie, who also became an artist, or neighbors like Karl and Anna Kuerner, a German-American couple he painted many times in Chadds Ford, and Christina Olson, the crippled woman in Christina's World whom he knew from around his summer home in Cushing, Maine...
...behind them, she offered a melodramatic one-word reply: "Love." However they came to light, their "discovery" and the suggestion that they represented some secret love affair was news that got them on the cover of TIME and Newsweek and then a big exhibition at the National Gallery of Art in Washington...
...Wyeth won't be remembered for the dubious moment of Helga. It's all those other quiet, elusive canvases that will stay with us. The canons of art history have loosened quite a bit in recent decades, enough so that no full picture of the modern world can exclude what he did. Who knows? Someday MoMA may even bring Christina all the way in from the cold...