Andrew Wyeth, 2007
Andrew Newell Wyeth (Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, July 12, 1917- Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, January 16, 2009) was an American realistic painter. His best known work is Christina's World (1948).
Andrew Wyeth was the youngest of five children and because of his bad health he was taught at home by his parents. He learned painting of his father, Newell Convers Wyeth, one of the best-known American illustrators, making about 3,000 paintings and illustrating 112 books, including the classics Treasure Island, Kidnapped and The Boy's King Arthur. He also painted maps for the National Geographic Society.
Wyeth's career was launched when he in October 1937 had his first solo exhibition of watercolor paintings in the Macbeth Gallery in New York. It was a big success and all works were sold out soon. He also illustrated a little in his early career.
From 1939, he began to paint landscape paintings of Pennsylvania and Maine, where he spent his summers with almost photographic accuracy. Wyeth made use of tempera, which his brother-in-law Peter Hurd had introduced to him. He painted deserted places with a lonely figure here and there and often used brown and gray.
Wyeth's temperas were exhibited in the Macbeth Gallery Show in 1941 and in 1943 at the "American Realists and Magic Realists" exhibition in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. His work came under the category of magical realism. His father died in October 1945, which had a big influence on Wyeth. After that, his work became more emotional. Although in his earlier work, he had occasionally painted a human figure, for example, in Rum Runner (1944), he began to paint people seriously after his father's death. In 1966, a major review of Wyeth's work at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia and the Baltimore Museum of Art in 1966-67 attracted hundreds of thousands of visitors and broke visitor records in 1967 in the Whitney Museum before going to the Art Institute of Chicago. / p>
In the period 1971-1985 Andrew Wyeth painted a series of portraits, entitled the Helga Pictures. He made 247 studies of their neighbor, the Prussian Helga Testor, who was musical among others.
In 1977 Wyeth made his first trip to Europe to be installed in the French Academy of Fine Arts, the only American artist since Singer Sargent, who was admitted to the Academy. In 1978 he was elected by the Soviet Academy of Arts as honorary member. Recently, Wyeth received the 2007 National Medal of Arts.
In 1940 he married Betsy James. Their son Jamie Wyeth also became a painter.
wiki
