Word: wyeth
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...Andrew Wyeth can lay claim to being the most successful painter of his generation. He is the youngest painter ever to be inducted into the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Letters, and although his formal schooling during his ailing childhood never went beyond first grade, he holds an honorary doctor of arts degree from Harvard. Comfortably completing the picture of success is the fact that a full-scale Wyeth tempera today brings $8,000 to $12,000, and his watercolors, sometimes dashed off in 20 minutes, bring...
...Wyeth has won acclaim (TIME, July 16, 1951) despite the fact that his painstaking realism, his romantic, nostalgic overtones and meticulous brushwork flout nearly every tenet of the paint-for-paint's-sake schools of abstraction and impressionism now in vogue. He paints what he knows best: his latest tempera, titled Chambered Nautilus,* is a portrait of his mother...
Owned by Television Producer-Actor Robert Montgomery, Chambered Nautilus is currently on exhibit in Manhattan's Whitney Museum Annual. Four and a half months in the painting, it is a real Wyeth tour de force. Its breeze-blown, transparent valances swaying from the old-fashioned fourposter, its daring use of bare wall and blank window contrasted with the meticulous rendering of wicker basket and window-shade drawstring, require skills and technique that few modern artists even claim to possess...
What gives power to the 47-in.-by-24-in. painting is the fact that it is obviously rooted in reality. The frail figure of 72-year-old Mrs. Merle Davis James is just as Wyeth saw her last summer in her house a mile from Wyeth's summer place in Gushing, Me. Stricken successively with a severe muscular disease, a heart attack and pneumonia, Mrs. James had finally climbed out from under an oxygen tent, snapped at the nurse, "All this is ridiculous." Wyeth, impressed and moved by her spirit and courage, set out to paint her during...
...work progressed, Wyeth suddenly realized that the sea shell set by chance at the foot of the bed was in fact symbolic of his subject. The nautilus builds additional "chambers" on its shell as it matures; so, he felt, Mrs. James "had built another room on the series of rooms that is her life." The painting gives substance to a Wyeth principle: "So many artists tell me they reached the bottom of realism too fast. They reached the depth of their own emotions, but not of the object. What the subject means is the important thing...