Andrew Wyeth: The Complete Story
Andrew Wyeth was the American painter of Christina's World, the most argued over picture in the country's art. Born in 1917 in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, he spent ninety one years painting two small places and made them feel like the whole of America.
Critics called him an illustrator for half a century while museums broke attendance records with him. Here is the quiet life behind the quarrel.
Wyeth at a glance:
Born in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, in 1917, son of illustrator N.C. Wyeth.
Christina's World entered MoMA in 1948 and never left the public mind.
Worked in egg tempera and drybrush watercolor his entire life.
Painted the secret Helga pictures over fifteen years.
Died in 2009 at 91, in the same square mile he painted.
N.C.'s son, schooled at home
C. Wyeth, the great adventure illustrator, and the sickly boy was taught at home and trained in his father's studio. At twenty, in 1937, his first New York show of watercolors sold out in two days.
Then, in 1945, his father's car was struck by a train at a crossing near home, killing him and Andrew's small nephew. Wyeth said the loss gave his work its reason: from then on, the landscape was full of the dead.
Christina's World, 1948
In Cushing, Maine, his neighbour Christina Olson, her legs paralysed by illness, refused a wheelchair and pulled herself across the fields by her arms.
Wyeth painted her from behind, low in a dry meadow, the farmhouse far off at the top.
The Museum of Modern Art bought Christina's World in 1948 for 1,800 dollars, and it slowly became one of the most recognised images in American art.
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Tempera, drybrush, and two townships
He worked in egg tempera and drybrush watercolor, slow, dry, layered techniques centuries old, and he painted almost nothing but Chadds Ford in winter and Cushing in summer, the same hills, houses and neighbours for seventy years.
The palette is mud, bone and snow. He called himself, accurately, an abstractionist who happened to paint things.
The Helga secret
In 1986 the news broke that Wyeth had spent fifteen years, from 1971, secretly painting his neighbour Helga Testorf: more than two hundred and forty works no one had seen, not even, he claimed, his wife Betsy, who managed his career.
Time and Newsweek both put Helga on the cover the same week. The pictures toured the country while the art world argued about whether the secrecy was the point.
The myth: the sentimental illustrator
For decades critics used Wyeth as shorthand for everything modern art had left behind.
The pictures argue back: they are pictures of absence, empty rooms, worn thresholds, a body facing away, closer in spirit to Hopper's silences than to any calendar.
The public never needed convincing, and the museums came around; his memorial retrospectives filled rooms on two continents.
Where to see Wyeth
Christina's World hangs at MoMA in New York. The Brandywine Museum of Art in Chadds Ford, built around three generations of Wyeths, holds the deepest collection, and the Farnsworth in Rockland, Maine keeps the Olson House itself, open to visitors.
Tempera, the slowest paint alive
Wyeth mixed powdered pigment with egg yolk daily, building surfaces in thousands of hairline strokes that dry in seconds.
The medium forbids improvisation, which suited him: a field could take a season, a hillside a year. The dryness of the pictures is literal.
The Helga secret
From 1971 to 1985 he drew and painted his neighbor Helga Testorf, more than 240 works, telling no one, wife included.
The 1986 revelation made national covers and an uproar about what else the quiet realist was hiding. He answered, characteristically, with silence and more work.
Two houses, one lifetime
Wyeth painted almost nothing but Chadds Ford in winter and the Olson farm in Maine in summer, for seventy years.
The limitation was the method: he said he painted the things he knew until they stopped being things. Both houses are museums now.
The Andrew Wyeth questions that keep coming up
What is he known for? Christina's World and spare tempera scenes of rural Pennsylvania and Maine.
Who was Christina? Christina Olson, his Maine neighbour, paralysed by illness, who crossed her fields by arm.
What are the Helga pictures? More than 240 secret works of Helga Testorf, painted from 1971 and revealed in 1986.
When did he die? In January 2009, at 91, in his sleep at Chadds Ford.
Who was Christina? Christina Olson, his Maine neighbor, disabled by illness, painted crawling toward her farmhouse in 1948. The house still stands and is open to visitors.
What are the Helga pictures? Over 240 secret studies of Helga Testorf made between 1971 and 1985, revealed in 1986 to national headlines and shown at the National Gallery.
More secrets to unlock
One last fact
He is buried in the small Olson family cemetery at Cushing, within sight of the field Christina crossed, a spot he chose himself. The painter of that meadow lies in it, at the exact distance from the house that he painted.