Andrew Wyeth, one of the most popular and also most lambasted artists in the history of American art, a reclusive linchpin in a colorful family dynasty of artists whose precise realist views of hardscrabble rural life became icons of national culture and sparked endless debates about the nature of modern art, died Friday at his home in Chadds Ford, Pa. He was 91.
Read the rest of the NYT article here.
I remember my first discovery of Wyeth. As a kid my dad surrounded me with books putting many classics on my bedroom shelves. Robin Hood, King Arthur, all illustrated by NC Wyeth...the elder of the Wyeth art dynasty. In high school when I first got into art I would often go downtown to the National Gallery of Art looking and learning, and scavenging through the museum store for clearance books. And thats where I first discovered Andrew Wyeth. A book called "The Helga Pictures" full of amazing pencil drawings, watercolors and tempera's of his muse, a nieghbor farm girl named Helga. The dedication of his painting was amazing. His craftsmanship and painting techniques, turning tempra into life like images was on a different level than anything i'd seen from an artist living in the same century as me.
Like many others once i discovered Picasso and modernism I moved on from the idealistic realism of Andrew Wyeth. The one artist who truely ignored modernism, he stayed true to himself and made the work that he wanted to make. A great lesson for any artist, designer or creative.
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