Time forgets many things, among them that in his day, Andrew Wyeth caused endless controversy. Art critics considered his realistic landscapes and portraits inspired by his immediate surroundings in Pennsylvania and rural Maine to be overrated. But the public flocked to them, making him one of the most popular artists of the 20th century. His best-known work, Christina’s World, hangs in the Museum of Modern Art. Showing a woman in a pink dress sprawled upon a field of grass, looking at a gray-clad house in the distance, it remains one of the most iconic works in the canon of American painting, as recognizable as Grant Wood’s American Gothic or Emmanuel Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware.
Today, Wyeth’s paintings seem less controversial than they do historic, capturing a vision America that is increasingly fading into the past. In a retrospective of his work co-organized by the Brandywine River Museum of Art and Seattle Art Museum, Wyeth’s importance is not up for debate. Instead, the exhibition offers a comprehensive look at his 75-year career. Encompassing 110 paintings and drawings that span from the late 1930s through 2008, the year before Wyeth died in his sleep at the age of 91, the works show a somber, Puritan vision of America, where even in the warmer months, winter seems to dominate.
Surprises abound. Historically, Wyeth’s style was called mechanical and unremarkable, but this does not seem so of the diaphanous curtains in the windows of his houses, or the feathers he captures floating in the air on a stormy day. Also surprising is the diversity of Wyeth’s subjects. Present are additional portraits of Christina Olson, the subject of Christina’s World, who he first encountered near his summer home in Maine, as well as images of his neighbors in Anna and Karl Kuerner. Among these familiar faces are portraits of black and Native American people he encountered near his primary residence in Chadds Ford, Pennyslvania.
Surreal elements create a sense that the works are more fiction than document. In Spring (1978), an elderly man seems to melt along with the snow into a field of wet grass, his apparent end belying the renewal implied in the title. In Snow Hill (1989), a group of people dance around a Maypole, celebrating the arrival of spring seemingly in the dead of winter.
At its best, Wyeth’s work is both painting and memory, capturing an America lost to strip malls, highways, social media and the 21st century.
The retrospective is currently open at the Brandywine River Museum of Art through September 17. It will then open at the Seattle Art Museum on October 19, 2017, and run through January 15, 2018.
To see a selection of works from the exhibition, visit the slideshow at the top of the page.
