Word: forded
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Andrew Wyeth, who died today at 91 at his home in Chadds Ford, Pa., was the great problem of American modern art. He was a problem first because he so completely refused to be modern in any terms that the art world cared about or could stomach. Long after it was no longer fashionable or even permissible to practice a flinty, granular realism, Wyeth went on making pictures with the kind of brushwork that specified the world in almost molecular detail. That his technical capabilities were so apparent only made it more annoying to some critics that he wouldn...
...idyl ended on an October morning in 1945: N.C. was killed by a train that struck his station wagon in Chadds Ford. Wyeth took his father's death harder than any of the others in the family. Intimations of mortality clouded the clear sky of fantasy. He had never painted his father. Three years after N.C.'s death, Wyeth painted Karl, a stern portrait of his neighbor Karl Kuerner, shown in his attic room. Above Karl's head are two meat hooks, like falcon's claws, thrust down from the ceiling. Says Wyeth: "It was really...
...Museum of Modern Art, was asked about Wyeth, he replied, "Who? But perhaps we pronounce his name differently here." Wyeth returns the compliment. He has never felt the need to go to Europe-or, for that matter, to much of anywhere else that is very far from Chadds Ford or Cushing...
Wyeth feels that if he wants to find exotic things, he need only explore a couple of miles beyond the gas station at the Chadds Ford crossroads. But if he does not first learn his own small world to the last detail, how will he abstract the vibrancy and vitality from it, how will he record the unexpected, the out-of-kilter, the sudden clap of distant thunder? So he has chosen to follow the advice of Poet-Painter William Blake and see a world in a grain of sand...
...Young American is only a boy that Wyeth knows, not a totem conjured up from American mythology. He proves that the microcosm of Chadds Ford and Cushing is not so intimate a topography that the whole world cannot be gleaned from it. As Gertrude Stein wrote, "Anybody is as their land and air is," and Wyeth's land and air happen to be everybody's. It is a visible metaphor of any world...