Painter Andrew Wyeth Dies

Andrew Wyeth died this week. He left behind a legacy of American Realist paintings. Called the "Painter of People" his mature works were characterized by a subdued color palette, realistic renderings, and the depiction of emotionally charged, symbolic objects and/or people. In part, this amount of emotion in his works was fueled by the tragic death of his father and nephew when they were hit by a train in 1945.
His most famous works included Christina's World, and the Helga pictures. Christina's World depicts a young girl who was a friend of the Wyeth family. She had contracted polio at a young age and was paralyzed from the waist down, yearning for the home in the distance. Painted in 1948, using tempura on wood he created a world for Christina that one could imagine represented the limits of a disability in the American frontiers.

The Helga pictures are even more intriguing in the fact that they are a series of portraits of a neighbor to the Wyeths. Neither Helga's husband nor Wyeth's wife were aware of the painter-model relationship that developed. The Helga pictures are not an obvious psychological study of the subject but more of an extensive study of her physical landscape set within Wyeth's customary landscapes. She is nearly always unsmiling and passive, yet within those deliberate limitations, Wyeth manages to convey subtle qualities of character and mood, as he does in many of his best portraits. This extensive study of one subject studied in differing contexts and emotional states is unique in American art.

An artist shown at the art gallery I work at compares himself to Andrew Wyeth as a realist painter within the surf art genre. Ashton Howard (whom I have mentioned previously)is a fine art artist. His subject matter of choice is the ocean and tropical islands. While less commercial than Christian Riese Larsen painting I find his images to be lacking in the realism that he considers puts on the same tier of Wyeth. The tones and color palettes in his works are moody, rather than muted, and I have yet to see a person in his works at all. While the renderings are realistic- i.e. they resemble waves in nature- the images are highly romanticized tropical images that toe the line between commercial and fine art.

Howard's comparison is a testament to Wyeth's longevity and widespread appeal even in the 21st century world of modern art installations that make no sense.





Disclaimer: I am not Andrew Wyeth nor am I Ashton Howard and all images are used for examples only, no profit is made. All Andrew Wyeth facts from the first paragraph were taken in part from wikipedia.com, citations on the Andrew Wyeth page.