Andrew Wyeth | Regionalist painter

Andrew Wyeth, in full Andrew Newell Wyeth, (born July 12, 1917, Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, U.S. - died January 16, 2009, Chadds Ford), American🎨 watercolourist and worker in tempera noted primarily for his realistic depictions of the buildings, fields, hills, and people of his private world.

Wyeth’s father, N.C. Wyeth, was a well-known illustrator who had studied under Howard Pyle and who, starting in 1932, served as his son’s only teacher.

Andrew Wyeth’s first exhibition was in 1936 at the Art Alliance of Philadelphia, but his first important New York City show took place in 1937 at the Macbeth Gallery. The show was an instant hit and every painting was sold.

The subject matter of Wyeth’s pictures has come almost entirely from two localities, the Brandywine Valley around Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, and the area near his summer home in Cushing, Maine.

Wyeth’s technical resources are remarkable. His work displays a strong linear quality, and within his limited palette - consisting mostly of earth tones - he achieves a subtly extensive range of colour.

His paintings are precise and detailed, yet he moves them beyond photographic naturalism by imbuing them with a sense of subjective emotion.

Perhaps Andrew Wyeth is famous not so much for the type of painter he was, but more the painter he wasn't, as his subjects and style also varied drastically from many of the abstract oil painters from that period.

Andrew Wyeth painted typically rural subjects, like those you might find in rural Pennsylvania.

His subjects were often open, desolate landscapes and much of his work showed traces where humans were left behind (tracks, roads, beds, chairs, etc.) Wyeth preferred the quiet contemplative desolation of the rural landscape-much of his work sets a quiet mood.

He liked to disguise the familiar by light or distance and there's a certain "approach yet withdrawal" about his work.

His best-known painting, Christina’s World (1948)🎨, achieves a note of melancholy in its depiction of a polio victim seemingly trying to climb up a hill. This work also exemplifies his use of unusual angles and his mastery of light.

Between 1971-1985 Wyeth secretly painted Helga Testorf, his neighbour in Chadds Ford, creating hundreds of images of her, including nudes.

Art historians have often characterized Wyeth’s work as sentimental and antithetical to the abstract trajectory of 20th-century art. In the face of such criticism, Wyeth’s work has always been popular.

• He was the first painter to receive the Presidential Freedom Award🎨, which President John F. Kennedy conferred on him in 1963.

• In 1977, Wyeth became the first American artist🎨 since John Singer Sargent🎨 to be elected to the French Académie des Beaux-Arts, and in the next year he became an honorary member of the Soviet Academy of the Arts.
• In 1980 he became the first living American artist to be elected to Britain’s Royal Academy.
• His exhibition at the Whitney Museum in New York in 1967 established a new attendance record for that institution.
• A 1987 show of his so-called “Helga pictures”, organized by the National Gallery of American Art in Washington, D.C., was also very popular, as was a 2006 retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
• In 1990 he became the first artist to be awarded🎨 the Congressional Gold Medal🎨, and in 2007 he was a recipient of the National Medal of the Arts. Andrew Wyeth, Autobiography was published in 1995. | © Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

Regionalist style is an american realist modern art movement that was popular during the 1930s. The artistic focus was from artists who shunned city life, and rapidly developing technological advances, to create scenes of rural life.

Regionalist style was at its height from 1930-1935, and is best-known through the so-called "Regionalist Triumvirate" of Grant Wood in Iowa, Thomas Hart Benton in Missouri and John Steuart Curry in Kansas.

During the Great Depression of the 1930s, Regionalist art was widely appreciated for its reassuring images of the American heartland.

Andrew Newell Wyeth, (Chadds Ford, 12 luglio 1917 - Chadds Ford, 16 gennaio 2009), è stato un artista visuale, soprattutto un pittore realista Statunitense🎨.

È stato uno dei più noti artisti americani🎨 del ventesimo secolo, talvolta indicato con l'appellativo di "pittore della gente" a motivo della sua popolarità tra il pubblico americano.

Era figlio del pittore ed illustratore N.C. Wyeth e di Carolyn Bockius di Wilmington.

Ebbe fratelli gli artisti Henriette Wyeth Hurd, Carolyn Wyeth, Ann Wyeth McCoy e l'inventore Nathaniel C. Wyeth.

Nel 1940 sposò Betsy James, che aveva incontrato nel 1939 nel Maine, la quale ebbe un'influenza su Andrew altrettanto forte che quella del padre, giocando un importante ruolo sulla sua carriera.

Una volta ella affermò: "Io sono un regista ed avevo il più grande attore del mondo" e fu padre dell'artista Henriette Wyeth, dell'artista Jamie Wyeth e di Nicholas Wyeth.

Nelle sue opere i soggetti favoriti sono il paesaggio e la gente della sua terra natale, Chadds Ford Township in Pennsylvania, e della cittadina di Cushing nel Maine, dove risiedeva d'estate e dov'è ambientato Christina's World, il suo dipinto più noto.

Realizzato nel 1948 in stile realista, il quadro è ispirato alla figura di Christina Olson, una donna che abitava nei pressi della casa di Wyeth, sin dall'infanzia non in grado di camminare a causa di una poliomielite spinale.

Nel celebre dipinto è ritratta distesa tra i campi, protesa verso la sua casa.

Nel 1963 Wyeth ricevette la Medaglia🎨 presidenziale della libertà dal Presidente Kennedy, primo pittore a ricevere la prestigiosa onorificenza. | © Wikipedia