Word: wyeth
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...obvious as well as for not so obvious reasons, Andrew Wyeth's 1948 painting Christina's World is one of my all-time favorite pictures. During the school year, it hangs on the wall of my room in Dunster House, a visual synopsis of another Christina's life, one far away from Harvard and my daily existence. With its clear, sweeping brush strokes, monochromatic color scheme, and spare format,Christina's World wipes trouble and anxiety from the mind of its viewer by providing a glimpse of a purer time preserved in the ambered golden tones of Wyeth's brush...
...comforting picture overall, one which suggests that its artist is imbued with similar values. In a crowd of fastliving, amoral 20th century artists, Wyeth would seem to be a sort of modern-day Jean Francois Millet, forsaking the sordidness of the city to paint human nature in its natural habitat, just as Wyeth himself finds solace in the woods of rural Maine...
Since last week's revelation that Wyeth has been painting a series of 200-plus portraits on the quiet for the past fifteen years, my estimation of him has dropped considerably. It's not that I mind him having done the series in the first place, but if he wasn't planning to tell anyone while he was painting them, why let the secret out now? With Wyeth walking around with a too-pleased-with-himself-for-words smile on his face and his wife, Betsy, talking about the paintings in terms of love and lovers, the entire episode smacks...
...paintings are the same. Helga is another Christina in another world, this time more in tune with the essential earth than before, possibly a reflection of a more sagacious and older Wyeth's point of view. With age comes wisdom but also occasionally paranoia. Perhaps 69-year-old Wyeth felt that if he never said a word about the paintings while he was still alive, they would be misunderstood. Perhaps our castigation of the artist for his mute revelation is too harsh and premature. The calm and gentleness of his hidden secrets excuses almost anything...
...Andrew Wyeth painted landscapes of this bucolic stretch of Pennsylvania, but could he ever have imagined these small, warped figures inhabiting them? Brad Whitewood Sr. (Christopher Walken) runs a scuzzy gang that makes millions breaking into company safes and hijacking tractors. His estranged wife and her mother slouch around their dreary house staring at TV. Brad Jr. (Sean Penn) is searching for something worth spending his teenage energy on: maybe his lay-about friends, maybe that cute 16-year-old he's just met (Mary Stuart Masterson), maybe the toxic dream of emulating...