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Andrew Newell Wyeth ( 1917 - 2009 )  Category ( Painters ) [suggest a correction]
 

Andrew Newell WyethAndrew Newell Wyeth was a realist painter and one of the best-known 20th century regional artists. Born on 12 July 1917 to illustrator and artist, N.C. Wyeth, Andrew's family was creative from the beginning. Andrew is brother to inventor Nathaniel C. Wyeth and artist Henriette Wyeth Hurd. He also is father to artist Jamie Wyeth.

Wyeth was the youngest of five children, and he was home-tutored. His father taught his son in figure study and watercolor, and Wyeth later learned to master egg tempera from his brother-in-law Peter Hurd. Wyeth was self-taught in art history and a favorite master was Winslow Homer.

Wyeth held his first one-man show in 1937 at age twenty in the Macbeth Gallery, New York. The entire show sold out, and his future as a fine artist seemed assured. But, while museum exhibitions filled with Wyeth's work always set attendance records, critics remained critical about his work during a time when abstraction and expressionism was popular.

Wyeth focused on the people and places of Pennsylvania's Brandywine River Valley and the Maine coast near Cushing, where he lived his entire life. He painted fields and hillsides, wildlife, buildings and farmhands, creating a tribute to a 20th-century life in these areas. Perhaps his most famous painting, "Christina's World," was created in 1948, three years after his father's death. This painting illustrates a young crippled woman in a pink dress as she crawls across a brown field toward a farmhouse.

In the 1980s, Wyeth focused on a series of 45 paintings that included Prussian-born Helga Testorf as his model. These nudes were painted without the awareness of Wyeth's wife or Helga's husband; so, when Wyeth presented this series to the public, it was, according to the Washington Post, "arguably the art event of the decade."

Andrew's father, N.C. Wyeth was killed in 1945 when his car stalled on a train track and was struck by a train. This event altered Andrew's perspective on life and his art, as his work became more subdued and included emotionally-charged symbols. But, over his entire life, Wyeth maintained a realistic style.

Married to Betsy James in 1940, Wyeth had two sons by her, Jamie and Nicholas. Wyeth died on January 16, 2009 at his home in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania in his sleep after a brief illness. He was 91 years old.

Image: Painter Andrew Wyeth receiving the National Medal of Arts from US President George W. Bush (cropped), 2007.


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