Andrew Wyeth is one of the most popular twentieth-century American painters. The son of painter and illustrator N. C. Wyeth (1882-1945), Andrew grew up in an environment devoted to art. His father was his only teacher. With his first solo exhibition at the Macbeth Gallery, New York, in 1937 he established his preference for subject matter derived from his own surroundings. During the first fifteen years of his career he had frequent exhibitions at the Macbeth Gallery and at Doll and Richards, Boston, and in 1962 was accorded the first of several major museum retrospectives at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo.
Unlike most artists working in the 1930s and early 1940s who extolled a regionalist aesthetic, Wyeth never abandoned representation nor his ties to his immediate surroundings. The subject of his art is the people and countryside of Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, and his summer home in Cushing, Maine. Wyeth goes beyond mere reportage, infusing his landscapes, architectural studies, interiors (which are almost still-life compositions), portraits, and figure paintings with a transcendental quality. Wyeth has been lauded for his exceptional technique and personal subject matter. His early watercolors are in the tradition of WINSLOW HOMER. The meticulous realism of his subsequent work was first achieved in the late 1940s with his adoption of tempera, a medium introduced to him by his brother-in-law, artist Peter Hurd (1904-1984).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
George Plimpton and Donald Stewart, "An Interview with Andrew Wyeth," Horizon 4 (September 1961): 88-101 § Wanda Corn, The Art of Andrew Wyeth (Greenwich, Conn.: New York Graphic Society for M. H. de Young Memorial Museum, San Francisco, 1973), with reprints of articles by Brian O’Doherty and E. P. Richardson and of an interview with the artist by Richard Meryman, bibliography by Deborah H. Loft, list of exhibitions, served as a catalogue of an exhibition held at the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum, 1973 § Betsy Wyeth, Wyeth at Kuerners (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976) § Thomas Hoving, Two Worlds of Andrew Wyeth: A Conversation with Andrew Wyeth (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1978) § Betsy J. Wyeth, Christina’s World: Paintings and Pre-studies of Andrew Wyeth (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1982).
