Word: fording
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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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...
...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...
...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. But though these people are his familiars, they look to us enclosed, subdued, even solemn, always keeping something of themselves to themselves...
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...