I came upon Andrew Wyeth’s “Wind from the Sea” and was captivated by its haunting beauty - a simple attic window with a tattered curtain billowing in the wind – I had to find out about him and see more of his work and the Realism movement.
Gustave Courbet is deemed the undisputed leader of the Realism movement which emerged in France during the 1840’s and the Revolution of 1848. Realism artists denounced romanticism, which had prevailed in French art and literature since the early eighteenth century.
Examples of early Realism
(Left to right) The Stonebreakers, Courbet, 1849. The Winnower, Millet, 1848. The Potato Eaters, Van Gogh, 1885.
Twentieth century Realists of note include the American artist Edward Hopper. In his work there is evidence of the influence of Impressionists such as Monet, Cezanne and Van Gogh. In many cases I find the line between Impressionism and Realism to be quite blurred. Wikipedia defines Realism:
“Sometimes called Naturalism, is generally an attempt to represent subject matter truthfully, without artificiality and avoiding speculative fiction and supernatural elements.”
Lucien Freud, although best known for his figurative and nude art, was also a Realist painter, in his highly individualised style. His paintings were extremely truthful, sometimes brutally so!
In Freud’s work I recognise and enjoy the emotional engagement of the artist with his subject, yet I find Hopper’s work to be quite stark and cold, it doesn’t hold my engagement and pull me in the way that Freud and Wyeth’s paintings do.
Chop Suey, Hooper, 1929 The Big Man, Freud, 1975
Returning to Andrew Wyeth. For me, his paintings reveal the beauty and simplicity of the ordinary - his everyday world, so personal and familiar, beautifully detailed. I feel his deep sense of place and belonging to his childhood home which I recognise in my own sense of place, Towneley woods and the Deer Pond.
Wyeth was born in Chadd’s Ford, Pennsylvania, the last of five siblings. He was born into a family of artists and was home-schooled due to poor health. His education was one of personal exploration within a family that prized imagination and creativity. His father began his formal art education in the studio where his father and two of his sisters worked.
His father encouraged and inspired his love of landscape and most of his work was centred around his immediate rural surroundings. The local farm where he worked became a major theme of his. When Wyeth married he remained local, living in a converted schoolhouse at the foot of the driveway of his parents’ home. The family spent summers in Maine where he became friends with a farming family named Olsen, their disabled daughter Christina was to be a lifelong friend and the subject of what is arguably his most famous painting.
His father showed Andrew’s early work to a New York art dealer, who staged a solo exhibition for him. The show sold out in two days and Wyeth became a rising star in the art world.
Examples of Wyeth’s early watercolour works
Wyeth’s work took a dramatic shift in 1945 when his father and young nephew were killed in their car at the railway crossing at Chadd’s Ford. His work became more barren with more muted colours; his figures became less enigmatic. Wyeth said that his grief caused him to “focus intensely and with deep emotion from then on.” I find that emotion clear to see in all his work from 1945 onwards.
Winter, 1946
“The boy was me at a loss, really….. my father’s death….put me in touch with something beyond me. Things to think and feel, things that meant everything to me.”
The setting for the painting overlooks the site of the railway crossing where his father and nephew died.
As the years passed Wyeth’s palette lightened and his later work began to include some hints of vibrant colour.
Wyeth’s love of landscape and nature shines through in the paintings below. In Pennsylvania Landscape he claims to “feel the history present in the land itself” and he had “strong feelings for the American Revolutionary War, the aura which surrounds me here.”
Pennsylvania Landscape, 1941 Dryad, 2007
The colours and the light and shade on these paintings demonstrate Wyeth’s passion for detail when capturing the essence of the natural world.
Wyeth’s painting “Christina’s World” of 1948 has been dismissed by many critics as “kitschy nostalgia” yet there is a back story to this work which makes the painting intriguing. When at their summer holiday home in Maine, Wyeth became friends with the Olsen family who lived on a nearby farm. Their daughter Christina suffered from a neurological condition which meant she had little movement in the lower body and often moved around the family’s farmhouse by crawling. In this painting Wyeth wanted to:
“do justice to her extraordinary conquest of a life which most people would consider hopeless.”
Despite some critics finding the subject matter of his work tired and oversweet, Wyeth was the recipient of many honours both home and abroad, including:
- The Presidential Medal of Freedom, 1963
- First US artist to be elected to the Royal Academy, 1980
- Congressional Gold Medal, 1988
- National Medal of Arts, 2007
“I think one’s art goes as far and as deep as one’s love goes. I see no reason for painting but that if I have anything to offer, it is my emotional contact with the place where I live and the people I do.”
Andrew Wyeth Olsen’s Farm Wyeth’s wife, Betsy Chadd’s Ford
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