Word: wyeth
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...establishment hated Wyeth for much of his career. He was a regionalist and a realist when the vogue was abstract expressionism, a plainspoken farmer among chain smoking wildmen. He was the country mouse; they were the city mice. He had nothing new to show them, and they had no time...
...thing was, though: everyone else loved him. Wyeth was the first artist to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1963, and the farmhouse depicted in his most famous single work, “Christina’s World,” is the only building to make the National Register of Historic Places for being the subject of a painting. No one less infamous than Richard Nixon, toasting Wyeth at the White House, said that his paintings “captured the heart of America...
...discord surrounding Wyeth made that seem a little foolish. Is it really possible to “capture the heart of America?” You can make the argument that, if anyone could, Wyeth did. He took for his subject none other than the great American landscape. His subjects were plainspoken farmers, windswept grasses, people who worked hard and took pride in sacrifice. You know, Amurricans...
...what about progress? What’s more American than that? Rob Storr, the dean of the Yale University School of Art, called Wyeth “anti-modern,” and the posthumous consensus is that he gave the “silent majority” that were his fans the illusion of an America that no longer existed. Wyeth did his best-remembered work in the post-WWII 1940s, when America was just testing its strength as a world power. America had growing pains, and Wyeth was prescribing the opiate nostalgia...
...grasses, tending all the force of her mind and body toward the gray, dilapidated farmhouse at the top of the long hill. This is not an ideal of the way life once was, but rather, at least as I see it, a parable of just dealing with it, which Wyeth happened to set in the fields of Pennsylvania that he knew and loved...