Word: wyeth
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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...
...Andrew Wyeth's skills as a 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...
...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...
...Wyeth's famous "poetry," when he arrived at it, always had something to do with a mood of almost palpable quiet - the quiet you find so often in Hopper, but without Hopper's way of making sunlight unnerving or that little thrill of voyeurism that Hopper liked to provide. Wyeth's people may not be looking back at you, but, Christina's World aside, you rarely get the feeling they're being watched unawares...
...though Wyeth might occasionally paint a dog sleeping sweetly on a bed, the comical cheer of Rockwell is not for him. What people mean when they accuse Wyeth of sentimentality is not that he gets cute, but that the world we see in his paintings seems like a place we might long to inhabit sometimes but don't actually live in. And the people he shows us - with their Yankee rectitude, the weathered parchment of their faces and their Nordic inwardness - seem to inhabit some prelapsarian America, the one that existed before automobiles and television. Wyeth's popularity coincided with...