Discovering Art Everyday - Andrew Wyeth
- Roxane Faulkner
- Dec 27, 2020
- 4 min read
Updated: Jun 11, 2024
Early Life
Andrew Newell Wyeth was born on July 12, 1917. He was the youngest of the 5 children of well-known illustrator and artist N.C. (Newell Convers) Wyeth and his wife, Carolyn Bockius Wyeth. The Wyeth’s hometown of Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, and their summer home in Cushing, Maine gave Andrew the landscape and people that inspired his life’s work. Wyeth was a visual artist who specialized in realist watercolor and tempera paintings.
Education
Andrew Wyeth was home-schooled because of his frail health. His only formal art education was from his father who was an American illustrator of the early 1900’s. Andrew was drawing at an early age. He was a draftsman before he could even read.
Andrew was not the only creative one out of the 5 Wyeth siblings. Henriette Wyeth Hurd, the eldest, became a well-known painter of portraits and still life. Carolyn, the second child, was also a painter. Nathaniel Wyeth, the third child, was a successful inventor. Ann was a musician at a young age and became a composer as an adult.
Early Work
In the early 1930s, Wyeth began painting Anna and Karl Kuerner, his neighbors in Chadds Ford. The Kuerners and their farm were one of Wyeth's most important subjects for nearly 50 years. As a teenager, Wyeth would walk the hills of the Kuerner Farm. He became close friends with Karl and Anna. Eventually, they invited Wyeth into their house. Inside, Wyeth documented the Kuerners, their home, and their life. In 1937, at age twenty, Wyeth had his first one-man exhibition of watercolors at the Macbeth Gallery in New York City. The entire inventory of paintings sold out.
Marriage & Family
In 1940, Wyeth married Betsy James, who he met in Maine. She played an important role in managing his art career. Andrew and Betsy had two sons. Nicholas was born in 1943 and James (Jamie) followed three years later.
Wyeth’s son Jamie followed his father's and grandfather's footsteps, becoming the third generation of Wyeth artists. Nicolas became an art dealer.
Wyeth painted portraits of both of his sons. Nicolas is portrayed in the left portrait and Jamie’s portrait is on the right
Tragedy
In October 1945, Andrew Wyeth’s father and three-year-old nephew, were killed when a freight train crashed into their car as it stalled on the tracks.
The death of his father was a personal tragedy as well as a formative emotional event in his artistic career. In 1946 Wyeth painted Winter. The landscape in this painting is synonymous with his father’s death. The railroad crossing where the fatal wreck took place is on the other side of the hill pictured in the painting. Wyeth himself never painted his father when he was alive, the hill in “Winter” became a portrait of his father.
Christina's World
One of Wyeth’s most well-known works is Christina’s World. It is set in the stark landscape of coastal Maine in 1948. Wyeth’s neighbor Anna Christina Olson inspired the composition, which is one of four paintings by Wyeth in which she appears. As a young girl, Olson developed a degenerative muscle condition—possibly polio—that left her unable to walk. She refused to use a wheelchair, preferring to crawl, as depicted here, using her arms to drag her lower body along.
This painting titled by Andrew’s wife, Betsy, “is more a psychological landscape than a portrait, a portrayal of a state of mind rather than a place (Roberts, Chan, Foreman, Hall, & Stoll 2019).”
The Helga Pictures
In 1986, Wyeth’s “Helga Pictures” were revealed. The Helga pictures contain 247 works, including nudes, of German-born Helga Testor. Helga was a caregiver for Wyeth’s neighbor Karl Kuerner in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. Wyeth painted her for 15 years, from 1971 to 1985, without the knowledge of either his wife or Helga's husband. These portraits were met with controversy because of their voyeuristic nature and the mystery of the relationship between Andrew and Helga.
Snow Hill
This 1989 painting is a culmination of all the people Wyeth painted in the past. Karl and Anna Kuerner, Helga Testorf, Bill Loper, Allan Lynch and Adam Johnson are dancing on top of the Kuerners’ hill in view of all the locations where they lived. On the hillside below is the Kuerner farm, and in the distance, we glimpse the railway tracks on which Wyeth's father was killed. Snow Hill encapsulates the spirit of Wyeth’s entire career.
A Long Life
On January 16, 2009, Andrew Wyeth died in his sleep in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. He was 91 years old. In 1963, Wyeth became the first painter to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 1990 he became the first artist to be awarded the Congressional Gold Medal, and in 2007 he was a recipient of the National Medal of the Arts.
Wyeth remains an enormously popular artist among the public. His work is in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Museum of Modern Art, among many others.
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