Andrew Wyeth: a secret love Greg Reitschlin
Andrew Newell Wyeth (1917 – 2009) was one of America’s best known and best loved painters of the latter half of the 20th Century. Schooled at home by his celebrated artist / illustrator father, N.C. Wyeth, Andrew was raised in a cloistered environment, learning to love at an early age the works of Robert Frost, Goethe, Tolstoy, Henry Thoreau, and the paintings of Winslow Homer – all the while becoming more and more obsessively focused. The only art lessons
the young Wyeth ever received were from his father from whom he learned figure study, landscape and watercolour and, eventually, his preferred medium of egg tempera. But it was not until 1986, when his mysterious Helga Collection was revealed, that Wyeth became internationally known. Greg Reitschlin takes up the story: While much of Wyeth’s work is technically flawless, many find it repetitious and formulaic, an uneasy mix of saccharin sweetness and coldly clinical illustrative skill. The art historian Robert Rosenblum was once asked to identify the most
overrated and the most underrated artist of the 20th Century. He replied: “Andrew Wyeth – both categories.” However, Wyeth’s most famous painting, Christina’s World (1948), rapidly gained iconic status, depicting in clear detail a neighbour with a degenerative neuro-muscular disorder, who spent hours crawling around the fields that bordered her home. Writers and film-makers reference it, the public love it, and in the 50s and 60s a reproduction would hang on every self-respecting American student’s wall. Like most iconic paintings it elicits a powerful emotional attraction as viewers ponder what narrative might lie behind the image. The painting epitomises Wyeth’s obsession with melancholia: the faceless, lonely, unmarried Christina leans forward as if straining to complete her uphill struggle towards the farmhouse on the horizon, and a normal life. RWA magazine
Autumn 2012
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