Word: wyeth
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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...
...worst of all was his popularity, which for much of his life was enormous. Until the other Andy came along - Andy Warhol - Wyeth and Norman Rockwell were without doubt the two most widely recognized names in American art. Wyeth's museum shows were blockbusters and his sale prices strong, especially after the Japanese discovered him in the 1980s...
...Even when Wyeth is admitted into the canon, he's held a bit at arm's length. The Museum of Modern Art in New York City owns his most famous canvas, Christina's World, which it acquired in 1948, soon after it was painted, for just $1,800. But while the picture is always on display at MoMA, it's consigned to what you might call an anteroom on the margins of the more respectably modern galleries, a salon des refuses that it shares with Edward Hopper's House by the Railroad. Seeing Christina splayed across her field of grass...
...Philadelphia Museum of Art; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia; William A. Farnsworth Library and Art Museum in Rockland, Me.; Shelburne (Vt.) Museum; New Britain (Conn.) Museum of American Art; Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Conn.; and Currier Gallery of Art in Manchester, N.H. * Drybrush, used by Wyeth's mentor of the miniature, Albrecht Dürer, as early as 1450, is more like drawing than watercoloring in technique. The artist works over still wet washes of water-soluble pigment with a brush dipped in concentrated color and squeezed almost dry. The stiff bristles, flattened and frayed looking...
...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...