Andrew Wyeth

K AREN BAUMGARTEN

A PA I N T E D L I F E

E

veryone knows Andrew Wyeth’s

Christina’s World. Even those who don’t know the name and title know the image. Not everyone knows much more, even though many think that they do. Detractors and champions alike fall into pre-packaged explanations for who the artist was and what he represented. There is much more to the work, much more to the empty field or the autumnal landscape or the figure turned away. The artist wanted to convey not a story, but invoke an emotion. Though painted in a realist style, there is plenty of room for a viewer to insert their own experience into the scene. “Andy” is well known in southeastern Pennsylvania and coastal Maine, but the image of Christina in her field is recognized around the globe. She represents the best known tempera painting of nearly three hundred that the artist would complete over seventy years of his career. Like so many of the figures in the artist’s work, Christina was a longtime personal friend as well as this painting’s subject. Like so many of the places depicted through the years, the artist knew the Olson farm inside and out, as if he lived there himself. The watercolor and pencil studies that were done for this one tempera represent thousands more studies and drawings, steadily catalogued as they were created by the artist’s wife and business manager, Betsy James Wyeth. Andrew Wyeth was a man of the twentieth-century, deliberately distilling his work down to restrained scenes, largely free of references to anchor them in time. This repeated and intensely concentrated study of the artist’s immediate environment would be a defining characteristic of his work. Instead of tiring of his environs, his engagement with them changed but didn’t leave him. He visited and revisited the people and places of his winter and summer homes, continually finding new ways to look at his world. Behind each composition was a lifetime of study, a deep immersion in

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Widow’s Walk 1990, TEMPERA ON PANEL 481/4 × 431/4 in. PRIVATE COLLECTION

Because of the bright blue and white palette, and the ocean in the distance, one could assume that this was painted in Maine. In actuality, the house stands at the top of a rise in Chadds Ford. To view this perspective, the viewer would to hover in mid-air before the home’s second story. Even then, the water behind the cupola would not be seen—there is no sea visible from any part of the house. This is an example of actual and imaginary places that the artist knit together to create a new locale that appears to be perfectly real.

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Braids 1990, TEMPERA ON PANEL 161/2 × 201/2 in. PRIVATE COLLECTION

Many of the Helga works are echoed in works other works released from the artist’s studio in the 1970s. This traditional portrait with highly developed textures and individually delineated strands of hair recalls a portrait of another Chadds Ford model from the 1970s, My Young Friend (1970 tempera on panel, Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection).

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Northern Light 1984, WATERCOLOR ON PAPER 293/4 × 213/4 in. BRANDY WINE RIVER MUSEUM OF ART, GIFT OF MR. AND MRS. ANDREW W YETH, 1996

North Light has layers of hidden significance. The snow blowing in the center of the composition provides an atmospheric reference to invoke the feel and sound of a winter wind. The artist loved this time of year, possibly in part for the opportunity to paint largely white compositions—a test of skill he relished. Finally, the building here is the N.C. Wyeth studio. More than 40 years after his father’s death, Andrew is still painting his non-figurative portrait.

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