"This exhibition marks the 100th anniversary of Andrew Wyeth's birth, on July 12, 1917. Presenting Wyeth's art decade by decade, it spans the artist's long working life -- seventy-five years, from 1937 to 2008. Wyeth painted nearly to his last days (he died on January 16, 2006) with his powers undiminished. Few other artists' careers run as steadily and prominently through the modern era."
"An unrelenting realist, Wyeth nevertheless evolved, sometimes subtly but often dramatically. The exhibition shows Wyeth in every attitude: as the painter of large temperas that took months or sometimes years to complete; as the obsessive painter who pushed the exacting and laborious technique of drybrush watercolor to stunning extremes; as the master draughtsman who could render his subjects in pencil with almost photographic clarity, yet also fling ink and watercolor to startling effect. This presentation shows something of his creative process, too: throughout the exhibition, constellations of works include preparatory drawings and watercolors that led here and there to a final statement in egg tempera. Finally, this retrospective exhibition charts the high points of Wyeth's remarkable career, from his first bravura watercolors and his greatest midcentury temperas to his last painting, which is shown here to a large audience for the first time."
Dreamscapes and Dramatis Personae
We think of Andrew Wyeth as a keen-eyed and exacting recorder of just what he saw—mostly, picturesque old barns, farmers, and lobstermen—but Wyeth’s pictures are fictions. People and places could send Wyeth into waking dreams that he pictured in detail. Each work is a mystery despite all the visual information Wyeth provides. They hint at stories that might explain what the pictures only suggest: isolation, marginalization, disorientation, angst, shock, or fear.
Critics have always measured Wyeth’s art against abstract painting. He was old-fashioned, they sometimes said, sentimental, an illustrator rather than a provocateur. But Wyeth found his way to a powerful symbolism through another modern art form—movies. When other artists were flinging paint to express the inner self and the modern age, Wyeth was obsessively studying the way that cutting-edge filmmakers were taking realism beyond storytelling to explore the human psyche and to deeply engage their viewers.
Wyeth’s dreams are set in two places: rural Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, where he was born and lived his entire life, and coastal Maine, where he summered every year until his death. The old, weathered Olson house in Cushing, Maine, and the Kuerner family’s icy-cold white farmhouse on a dark hill in Chadds Ford—these are often the settings for his psychological dramas. Wyeth’s characters are few: Christina Olson, Karl Kuerner, Betsy Wyeth, and Helga Testorf dominate. Wyeth’s art made these unassuming models famous. Some of us know them already. Others will be introduced to them here. Each character comes to life before us in almost cinematic clarity. And yet all of them were being directed to play a part—not from their lives, but from the artist’s own.
"I'm not at all interested in painting the object just as it is in nature. Certainly I'm much more interested in the mood of a thing than the truth of a thing." - Andrew Wyeth
Christina Olsen - 1947 - Tempera on hardboard panel.
"One day I came in and saw [Christina] on the back door step in the late afternoon. She had finished all her work in the kitchen and there she was sitting quietly, with a far-off look to the sea. At the time, hought she looked like a wounded seagull with her bony arms, slightly long hair back over her shoulder, and strange shadows of her cast on the side of the weathered door, which had this white porcelain knob on it." - Andrew Wyeth
Maga’s Daughter - 1966 - Tempera on hardboard panel.
"It’s more than a picture of a lovely looking woman. It’s blood rushing up. Portraits live or not on such fine lines! What makes this is that odd, flat Quaker hat and the wonderful teardrop ribbons and those flushed cheeks." - Andrew Wyeth
The subject is the artist’s wife, vivacious Betsy James Wyeth. The title refers to a term of endearment for Bess, or “Maga,” James, Betsy’s mother, whom Wyeth had grown especially close to before she died in 1959. Two generations of James women are here: Betsy, whose own beauty was a tribute to her mother’s; and Bess, who is physically present in the linen fragment that had once been hers and is now the frame’s liner. The embroidery on it was done by a friend."
"Within a decade, Andrew Wyeth evolved from a supremely gifted chip off the old block of his famous father, illustrator Newell Convers Wyeth, to a thoroughly modern artist, whose work entered the Museum of Modern Art’s collection in 1948. He had entered his father’s studio for formal art training in 1932, when he was fifteen. In 1937, when he was just nineteen, his New York debut, with dashing watercolors of Maine light and life, sold out. He even tried illustration himself. He shunned his early success in watercolor, however, to get ever closer to a new kind of subject matter—subjects that speak to wartime and economic bust—in the slow, meditative technique of egg tempera. All the effort he poured into developing tempera in the war years was prelude to the emotionally charged work that came at war’s end—not in response to war, but as a reaction to a death much closer to home: the unexpected, tragic death of his father. On October 19, 1945, N.C. Wyeth was killed at the railroad crossing near the Wyeths’ home when his car was struck by an oncoming train. Shaken to his core, Wyeth turned inward to memories and his own imagination. A cast of characters and set pieces, seemingly haunted landscapes and interiors, emerged in Andrew Wyeth’s art from a wellspring of grief."
Lobsterman (Walter Anderson) - 1937 - Watercolor on paper.
"The loose, transparent watercolors displayed here are unlike the watercolors elsewhere in the exhibition, which show the drybrush technique that became Wyeth's signature style. These examples are among his first paintings, all done on the Maine coast where the Wyeth family summered. They show his mastery of what was then the modern approach to watercolor -- boldly gestural and displaying dramatic strokes of wet, transparent watercolor as if painting with pure light. Wyeth was immediately declared the successor to the country's most famous and innovative turn-of-the-century watercolorist, Winslow Homer, also of Maine. But this style soon proved unsatisfying -- it came too easily to him, Wyeth believed."
Night Hauling - 1944 - Tempera on hardboard panel.
"In this work, a close friend from Maine, Walt Anderson, is stealing another fisherman’s lobster pot in the dark of night. This night world of the young lobster thief is dangerous, but it is also enchanting, as Wyeth shows us. The water seemingly “filled with fire,” Wyeth remembered, and “each dip of the blade of the oar made the water into a star light sky.” The water is illuminated by a mysterious bioluminescence of plankton and sea creatures that makes it seem like another cosmos."
Frog Hunters in the Brandywine Valley - 1941 - Tempera on hardboard panel.
"Wyeth had an eye for unusual composition. He dramatically collapsed this river scene by employing a rapid change in scale, from the enormous skunkcabbage plants in the foreground to the tiny figures near the top of the panel. In this swampy backwater of the Brandywine River, men are spearing, or “jigging,” for frogs as the river folk always did. We listen along with them as they are guided by the intermittent sounds of their prey. The painting relates closely to illustrations Wyeth made in 1941 for Henry Seidel Canby’s history of the storied Brandywine River. Wyeth was initially tempted to follow his father into illustration, but his new bride, Betsy James Wyeth, whom he had married in 1940, would have nothing of that kind of bread-and-butter work for her husband."
The Valley of the Shadow of Death
"After his father’s death in 1945, Wyeth rambled across the Chadds Ford hills feeling newly attuned to their associations with his home, his memories of his father, and the generations who had shaped this landscape and now haunted it. Kuerner’s Hill, opposite Karl Kuerner’s cattle farm and rising above the dreaded railroad crossing where N.C. Wyeth was killed, was a constant reminder—its mass, Wyeth said, suggested his father’s heaving chest, while at other times, it was his grave. Kuerner’s Hill figures prominently in Wyeth’s paintings time and again, from its appearance in Winter 1946—Wyeth’s first expression of his own deep grief—the puzzling scene of neighbor boy Allan Lynch running helter-skelter to its bottom, to its last significant inclusion, in 1989, in the imagined Yuletide round dance in Snow Hill, the title a reference to the great white whale Moby Dick—“a hump like a snow hill!”—that destroyed Herman Melville’s obsessed Captain Ahab. Kuerner’s Hill was a metaphor for Andrew Wyeth’s own nemesis, his father."
Pa with Glasses - 1936 - Charcoal and pencil on paper.
"Wyeth always regretted that he never painted his famous father, illustrator Newell Convers Wyeth, before the man’s tragic death in 1945. But as a nineteen-year-old, Andrew made this pencil portrait. The challenge of drawing the man who was not just his father but also Andrew’s teacher and toughest critic must have been daunting. “He’d look at me like a Brahman bull when he walked in the door to criticize my work,” the artist remembered, “and if he was glowering, I braced myself. In a few incisive words he’d bit right at some puny characteristics in my nature.” Though small in size, the portrait nevertheless conveys a looming figure. In life, N.C. Wyeth was domineering; in death, he haunted his son to the end of his life."
Hoffman’s Slough - 1947 - Tempera on hardboard panel.
"The Wyeth family’s properties in Chadds Ford stood on hallowed ground. The bloody Revolutionary War battle of Brandywine took place in the mud flats known as Hoffman’s Slough. Red tones comprise the many layers of color in what seems at first glance a lifeless, colorless field. The high vantage is one that Wyeth sought out in his melancholy moods. He regularly walked the ridge where he could watch the evening’s shade pass over the valley “like the eyelid of night. It all had death moving in.”"
I'm MUCH happier than I look in this photo. I just hate being photographed. Here I am, though, next to Public Sale - 1943 - Tempera on hardboard panel.
"In taking up tempera, Wyeth followed a revival of the ages-old medium popular at this time. But his father, N.C. Wyeth, never understood why this unyielding medium became his son’s preference —or comprehended his son’s desire to paint the somber-colored and timeworn landscape and its sobering, gray moods. But this was home, Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, the place where Andrew Wyeth felt deeply rooted.
Here, tempera imparts a violent life-and-death struggle to the land. The scene is the foreclosure sale of a local farm—but it was a familiar one across the country by the 1940s. The farm was centuries old,— but the way of life it now offered, in a time of economic bust, was tenuous."
I'm so happy that Rafa was tolerant of me for this exhibit, which turned out to be a sort of pilgrimage. Next to Mother Archie’s Church - 1945 - Tempera on hardboard panel.
A humble, crumbling monument to peace in a time of world war—that was how Wyeth might have seen the decaying Mother Archie’s church in 1945. The old Quaker meetinghouse and school stood on what had been contested ground in the bloody Battle of the Brandywine in 1777, and now it demarcated the implied border between Chadds Ford’s old European immigrant families and its black residents—here was Little Africa. The eighteenth-century stone octagon building was acquired in
1871 by The Reverend Lydia Archie, the first ordained female preacher in the African Union Methodist Protestant Church, as a home for a congregation. Wyeth remembered attending services here on occasion, but eventually the old building just collapsed.
Teel’s Island - 1954 - Watercolor on paper with drybrush.
"Henry Teel had a punt, and one day he hauled it up on the bank and went to the mainland and died. I was struck by the ephemeral nature of life when I saw the boat there just going to pieces." - Andrew Wyeth
Wind from the Sea - 1947 - Tempera on hardboard panel.
"Of all my work at the Olsons this seems to me to be the one that expresses a great deal without too much in it. I walked up into the dry, attic room one day. It was a hot summer day in August, so hot that I went over to that window, pushed it up about six inches and as I stood there, looking out, all of a sudden this curtain that had been lying there stale for years, God knows how long, began slowly to rise, and the birds crocheted on it began to move. My hair about stood on end." - Andrew Wyeth
Pushing Boundaries
"In the 1950s and ‘60s, Wyeth opened up to subjects that had previously eluded him. Art making was a process of discovery now. He painted his longtime friends among the disappearing community of African Americans who were part of Chadds Ford’s past. He painted his own family, too—Betsy (her portrait hangs at the entrance to the exhibition) and son Nicholas, included here. For Wyeth’s art, the period from 1946 to 1968 began and ended with ruminations on death—his father’s in 1945 and Christina Olson’s in 1968—but those years also saw portraits that affirm connections to the living.
In his practice, Wyeth now took advantage of chance encounters and unplanned effects. The large tempera Brown Swiss, for example, developed out of the act of pouring paint. He made field notes in pencil and watercolor at will, and even as he worked on a tempera in the studio, he returned again and again to his model and the subject’s own space, making notes that would inform or alter his original conception. The drawings and watercolor studies included here are intended to show Wyeth’s working method and his stunning command of a variety of mediums."
Brown Swiss - 1957 - Tempera on hardboard panel.
"One November afternoon as he climbed Kuerner’s Hill, Wyeth looked back over his shoulder and saw the Kuerner house mirrored, upside down, in the pond below, “the lucid pond looking almost like the eye of the earth looking up, reflecting everything in creation.”
He worked in vain on a tempera that might re-create that vision. Then one evening he let loose: in a large bowl he made up a watery mix of yellow-brown ochre and red-brown sienna. He stepped back and threw the liquid across the panel. The dappled panel now looked like the hard ground scored by Karl Kuerner’s Brown Swiss cattle. The picture of that original searing visual sensation, the eye of the earth, began finally to come into focus."
Young Bull - 1960 - Drybrush watercolor on paper.
"When Karl brought the young bull out for me, I painted him on the spot. He was symbolic of so much of what went on at Kuerner’s—the cattle and the house and the hills—tans and whites . . . the golden hill rising up behind, the house on the left, and the window where Anna was. I could hear her shouting, and every time she did the bull’s ears would flicker and twist, and suddenly I could see that pink of the inside of his ear. I’d bought this long, scroll-like piece of paper. I started with the house and got interested in the bull’s head, and the rest kind of flowed out from there. I kept on unrolling the paper and the painting happened naturally. I was amused to be there by the road, in the country, just unrolling this scroll and getting it down. It has a different sense of movement because of that scroll. ' - Andrew Wyeth
Day of the Fair - 1963 - Drybrush watercolor on paper.
"The season is spring, the setting is Wyeth’s studio, and the subject is fourteen-year-old Cathy Hunt, dressed up for the annual May Fair at the Chadds Ford Public School. We feel her awkwardness—at posing, certainly, but perhaps with adolescence and burgeoning womanhood as well. The school’s May Fair remains a celebration of the ancient rite of spring, and also of community and Chadds Ford’s history. Cathy Hunt and the black population that lived around Mother Archie’s Church were a part of that, too."
Nicholas - 1955 -Tempera on hardboard panel.
"Nicholas Wyeth is the artist’s younger son."
Tarpapering - 1952 - Watercolor on paper.
"Ben Loper and his son James could often be seen on the roof of their ramshackle shed putting down tarpaper. This watercolor is inscribed by Wyeth to his brother-in-law, artist Peter Hurd, who came to Chadds Ford in the 1920s to study with N.C. Wyeth and introduced young Andrew to tempera painting in the 1930s."
April Wind - 1952 - Tempera on hardboard panel.
"The subject is the inscrutable James Loper, his face nearly obscured by the turned-up collar of his coat. We cannot know this elusive man."
Winter Light - 1953 - Watercolor and pencil on paper.
Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, Presented to Robert Frost in 1954, on the occasion of his eightieth birthday, and given to the College in 1982 by Mr. and Mrs. Edward Connery Lathem.
"Wyeth told his biographer that he chose this watercolor himself to honor poet Robert Frost—a group of Frost’s friends had asked to purchase a Wyeth painting as a gift on the poet’s eightieth birthday. Wyeth loved Frost’s poetry, but he declined a request later on to paint the great bard’s portrait: “The art, the poetry, is the purest form. Not the man.”
The scene is of a lean-to behind the farmhouse next door to Wyeth’s studio in Chadds Ford."
(Incidentally, Robert Frost was one of my grandfather's favorite poets.)
The young Siri Erickson became Wyeth’s fixation even as he painted his final tributes to the Olsons, and she would inspire his first nudes in tempera.
In the summer of 1967, Wyeth had a premonition of Christina Olson’s death and felt compelled to paint her portrait for what he feared would be the last time. That fall in Maine, before he said goodbye to Christina, Wyeth had a chance encounter with another model, someone he felt could immediately fill the space in his imagination that Christina’s passing would leave. And this model could take his art into unexplored realms. The new catalytic force was the thirteen-year-old Siri—“a burst of life, like spring coming through the ground, a rebirth of something fresh out of death,” meaning Christina’s death.
The path in Wyeth’s mind that led from Christina Olson to Siri Erickson would soon take a more dramatic turn, leading to a new model, Helga Testorf, and a more wholly erotic art. “If you do this again, don’t tell me,” Betsy Wyeth said to her husband, chafing at the intimacy that her husband’s paintings of Siri suggested. He was already painting Helga in secret.
The Patriot - 1964 - Tempera on hardboard panel.
"What are men capable of when compelled by patriotism? That is the question posed by Wyeth’s favorite film, The Big Parade, and one Wyeth always asked about the war veterans he knew, like Karl Kuerner and Ralph Cline, a friend in Maine shown here.
Wyeth said that Cline’s sharpshooter medal took him back to his own childhood memories of watching The Big Parade, of war play, and of poring over battlefield photographs with his father. The painting encompassed Wyeth’s own imaginings of war and the conditions that try men’s souls. As he painted what we would call the “empty” background, Wyeth claimed to hear “the thunder of the Meuse-Argonne” and feel and smell “the dirt and mud Ralph stood in in the trenches.” The painting transported Wyeth to a place he long imagined, a place on earth where men killed and men died. Cline’s portrait was a deeply personal painting for Wyeth, and he never parted with it."
Alvaro and Christina - 1968 - Watercolor on paper.
Probably my favorite from the show.
"Alvaro Olson died in Maine on Christmas night 1967, and Christina, without him, died just weeks later, in January 1968. When Wyeth visited the Olson house the following summer, he felt their loss acutely in remnants that were tossed so casually about now: at the doors leading into the house from the woodshed sat Alvaro’s empty vegetable basket, and nearby, hung on nails as washrags, were pieces of Christina’s pink dress and her apron. Wyeth could see these two doors as the Alvaro and Christina he remembered—the shadowy Alvaro, who posed for Wyeth only once and remained always in the background as Wyeth painted in the Olson house, and, by contrast, the brilliant, captivating Christina."
Room after Room - 1967 - Watercolor on paper.
"In what proved to be his last summer with the Olsons, Wyeth painted Christina obsessively, feeling that these might be their last weeks together. He made this watercolor in a moment when he glimpsed her in quiet thought—and glimpsed too the full extent of her interior world, each successive room."
The Virgin - 1969 - Tempera on hardboard panel.
"If painstaking realism was associated with emotional detachment, Wyeth was determined to show that it could be otherwise. He dedicated himself to exploring the shock value of an erotic subject with his model Siri Erickson, beginning in 1968. Although the Siri nudes might seem like a sudden change of course for Wyeth, he thought they flowed naturally from the Christina Olson portraits, paintings that were shocking in another way for their discomforting coarseness. Wyeth discovered Siri just as Christina was dying. Death as a controlling obsession was set aside now: “I’ve found something else that excites me,” he said."
The Finn - 1969 - Drybrush watercolor on paper.
"To Wyeth, Siri’s father had a kinship with Karl Kuerner, so Wyeth believed for many reasons that his discovery of the Ericksons in Maine was fated. George Erickson, Wyeth learned, was born the same day and year as Karl Kuerner, and Wyeth found him equally dark. The Ericksons lived in an old house not far from the Olsons in Cushing. They lived in a kind of primitive state, apart from the modern world, having no indoor plumbing and few comforts. He wanted to dig deeper into the lives of the Ericksons, father and daughter."
Ericksons - 1973 - Tempera on hardboard panel.
"When Wyeth painted this portrait of George Erickson, Siri’s father, in the kitchen of his old house, Wyeth was five years into his artist-and-model relationship with the girl who had drawn him to the primitive confines of the Erickson’s place time and time again. Wyeth said he always thought about secrets that the aloof old Erickson kept and about secrets concealed behind the closed doors. At this time Wyeth was deep into his own consuming secret—he was making often-erotic studies of a Chadds Ford model, the married Helga Testorf, without the knowledge of his wife or of Testorf’s husband."
Wyeth painted Karl Kuerner in 1947, and he painted the Kuerner farmhouse and barn in major temperas in the 1950s and ‘60s. But he did not take Karl and his wife, Anna, as subjects until 1971, when circumstances brought Wyeth inside the Kuerner house as never before. Karl was ill and dying of leukemia, and Anna had hired a helpmate, Helga Testorf. Wyeth first painted Helga in the Kuerners’ upstairs rooms. Holed up in the house to draw and paint Helga, and sitting a long vigil over the sick and dying Karl, Wyeth studied the marriage of Karl and Anna up close.
Anna’s forced exile from Germany to America after the Great War left her depressed: she tended to live wholly within herself, mumbling in German. She was detached from her husband yet performed her household duties selflessly, heroically—a tiny woman withering away. Anna was usually unwilling to pose for Wyeth, but he watched her just the same. And in 1971, in one frozen moment, the elusive Anna Kuerner inspired what is arguably the most riveting image of a woman that Wyeth painted in the Helga years.
Anna Kuerner - 1971 - Watercolor on paper.
"Anna Kuerner was elusive, a tiny woman who moved in and out of vision like a darting bird and spoke only German. She had never wanted to pose, but one day she surprised Wyeth by relenting. Over the next two weeks he made studies of her in watercolor, pencil, and tempera."
The Kuerners - 1971 - Drybrush watercolor on paper.
"By 1970, Wyeth was being drawn inside the Kuerner house, into an intimate relationship with the occupants. Now Wyeth studied Karl and Anna together—Karl given to drunken bouts of meanness, and Anna, deep in depression, living within herself and speaking only in German. This is Wyeth’s portrait of their marriage. He had been struggling with a painting of Karl posing with his rifle when, one day, Anna walked up behind her husband, flashing anger yet again at his indifference. “God, her expression when she looked at him with that gun by chance pointed right at her was incredible,” Wyeth said."
Wolf Moon - 1975 - Watercolor on paper.
"A January full moon, which farmers call a wolf moon, drew Wyeth out for the midnight ramble that produced this watercolor. In that light at that hour, the strangeness of the Kuerner farm was only heightened. Wyeth was surprised when he came upon it to hear the sound of what he knew had to be tiny Anna Kuerner chopping kindling inside the woodshed for the breakfast fire. “I stood there in the crisp, chill moonlight, entranced,” he said. Back in the studio, he painted this recollection of the light and sound—completing it in less than an hour, using “a great deal of luxurious black in order to make the thing really shout” and leaving the unpainted white of the paper to impart the cold light. The painting embodies Wyeth’s thoughts, he said, of what was happening inside the house, unseen, as the frail but unstoppable Anna, now seventy-seven years old, worked heroically for her family and dying husband."
Evening at Kuerners - 1970 - Watercolor on paper with drybrush.
"“What I am doing now is so personal to me, it has nothing to do with Kuerners as a specific place anymore,” Wyeth would say in 1976. The painting Evening at Kuerners was not simply about a time of day, a quality of light, and a landscape. Initially, Wyeth sought to capture something of what he felt about the dying Karl Kuerner: the light in the ground-floor window was, to Wyeth, Kuerner’s flickering soul. But soon the painting came to be a repository of other sensations. Just looking at it, Wyeth could enter at will his own private world, feeling “how the steps curve up to the attic, and the cool air that comes out of that door when you open it.” We now know that at the time he recalled this sensation he was painting Helga in that upstairs room in secret."
Spring Fed - 1967 -Tempera on hardboard panel.
"In 1967, Wyeth returned to a subject on Kuerner’s farm—nearly a decade after his previous temperas set there. This time he was thoroughly absorbed in one dank corner of the gray Kuerner world, the spring-fed sink in the barn: "One day I became conscious of the sound of running, trickling water—nature pouring itself out. The painting that emerged is about the clang of the bucket, the crunch of hooves, the spilling of water. My sister Carolyn said that the basin looked like a sarcophagus. Yes. And that shining bucket’s the helmet of a knight who’s in that grave. Deep down, of course, the painting is about farming. . . . It’s about the brutality and the delicacy of life on the farm symbolized by that thin tin cup, that crooked faucet. . . . I’ve drunk that water many times; it’s the most delicious water. The way it comes over the ledge of the great trough and runs down the side is timeless. It’s like life itself, endlessly moving."
The German - 1975 - Ink and drybrush watercolor on paper.
"Karl Kuerner was always the German army machine gunner in Wyeth’s imagination, and he even dressed Kuerner up in his soldier’s coat and helmet as an old man to play the part again. Wyeth once said that Kuerner’s helmet alone spoke volumes about Karl’s “whole background, his experience in the Black Forest” during the First World War.
Look closely at Wyeth’s technique here. The painting was at first a detailed head study done in the studio. But to “unlock” some meaning deep within, to put Karl once again in the Black Forest, Wyeth spontaneously poured ink across the top of the sheet and let the dark drips flow down toward the head, manipulating them by moving the paper."
"By 1970, Andrew Wyeth was living a double life. The public Wyeth, a beloved painter of the picturesque Kuerner farm and the Olsons in their weathered clapboard house, was a popular brand. His success was thanks in large part to his wife, Betsy, who promoted her husband’s art by producing beautiful books and fine reproductions that put facsimiles of Wyeth’s paintings in homes and college dormitories across the country.
The private Wyeth sought a freedom to paint without any intrusion from his wife or the demands of the marketplace. He painted Helga Testorf, a neighbor woman in Chadds Ford, in secret—even from Betsy—for thirteen years, producing a series of often erotic paintings of another man’s wife. Wanting to shed artistic inhibitions, he jumped headlong into the themes of love and lust.
For Wyeth to keep his secret safe and not arouse Betsy’s suspicions, he could not fall off in his output. He had to keep painting ambitious temperas as he always did. But these other paintings from the Helga years cannot be dismissed as obligatory mechanical exercises or toss-offs; there is nothing safe, predictable, or easy in the paintings Wyeth produced in tandem with the secret Helga pictures. Something about painting Helga, and something about its secrecy, expanded the psychological range of Wyeth’s art."
Spring - 1978 - Tempera on hardboard panel.
"Here is the artist’s nightmarish vision of his dying friend. Kuerner’s wasting body is as Wyeth imagined it, on ice, atop Kuerner’s Hill, a landmark that haunted Wyeth forever after his father’s death nearby.
In the months before Kuerner succumbed to leukemia, in January 1989, Wyeth regarded his friend in such a suspended state, his body lifeless but his mind active and his visions clear. The dying man once lapsed into a waking dream of the Great War that allowed Wyeth to peer into Kuerner’s conscience. “Andy,” Karl asked, with “a far-off look” in his eyes, “did you hear that snapping?” The sound in Kuerner’s head was barbed wire being cut. He had a story to tell of the trenches, of opening fire on a battalion of French soldiers he knew only as the sound of snapping in the dark. “God, I felt I was there on the western front sitting with him,” Wyeth said. “That story broke me loose of where I was.”"
Black Velvet - 1972 - Drybrush watercolor on paper.
Private collection
"Here the sleeping Helga occupies a strange, incongruous place in an artist’s studio. Her meticulously rendered body now lives in the realm of art—the connection to Edouard Manet’s famous nude Olympia, with her black velvet ribbon choker, is often commented upon. Helga’s body floats as though on a dark sea. She glows by contrast. Wyeth’s precise drybrush watercolor technique forces us to stare. This is the equivalent of a filmmaker’s long, long static close-up that arouses all the viewer’s senses. His hyperrealism is obsessive, even possessive. Whatever the precise nature of the relationship he had with Helga, Wyeth shows us here that painting her was, in itself, an intimate act."
(It WAS the 1970s. EVERYONE had to paint a nude on black velvet . . .)
Olympia - 1863 - Edouard Manet, French, 1832-1883 - Oil on canvas.
Snow Hill - 1989 - Tempera on hardboard panel.
"Now in his seventies, Wyeth looked back. In his imagination he brought together, in one festive place, many of the models, living and dead, from his famous Chadds Ford pictures: the late Karl Kuerner, in his soldier’s coat and helmet; Karl’s delicate wife, Anna, joyful as never before; the one armed Bill Loper, dead now; Helga; Allan Lynch, a young suicide; and, just barely visible, the pig farmer Adam Johnson. The characters are from Wyeth’s world, but the image is based on the unforgettable final scene in Ingmar Bergman’s allegorical film masterpiece, The Seventh Seal (1957), in which religious crusaders perform the dance of death as they are led to their graves. Wyeth used this painting similarly, to say goodbye to his characters. The dead N.C. Wyeth was always, for his son, one with the great mound that was Kuerner’s Hill, so in a sense he is present here as well. The painter claimed that he, too, was in this picture, but where? One ribbon in this round dance has no apparent dancer. Is Andrew Wyeth the unseen dancer?"
Still from The Seventh Seal, 1957, Ingmar Bergman, director.
Night Sleeper - 1979 Tempera on hardboard panel.
"Wyeth’s dog, Nell Gwyn, sleeps on a window seat in a place much like the old miller’s house that Betsy had made into the Wyeths’ home. Wyeth would say, only well after the fact, that the painting was an extension of his studies of Helga asleep. That the dog was named for the mistress of Charles II might have secretly amused the artist. But imagine the painting as Andrew and Betsy Wyeth must have when they titled it together in 1979: they referenced a train car passing silently through the Wyeth property at night, moving out of the Brandywine Valley en route to someplace far away. Betsy had been feeling her husband slip away, she acknowledged. Through the Helga years, Betsy said in retrospect, she felt “the close relationship vanished, ever so slowly. Vanished.”"
Adrift - 1982 - Tempera on hardboard panel.
"Wyeth explained that this is a portrait of his dearest friend, Walter Anderson, merely asleep in his dory. But what we see is a lifeless body reverently laid out in a coffin-like boat that is conspicuously without oars. The only logical explanation of the scene is death, perhaps the funeral of an ancient mariner at sea. The painting was a strange studio construct. But in the background Wyeth added white-crested combers breaking over a submerged ledge that was known to local fishermen as “the Brothers,” a deliberate and touching reference here, no doubt, to the closeness Wyeth felt to Anderson."
Pentecost - 1989 - Tempera with pencil on hardboard panel.
"Once on Allen Island [in Maine] in early morning light there were fishnets hung to dry—a whole feeling of shrouds—a fateful quality, eerie feeling of a phantom—the veil that Maid Marian wore. While I painted, I thought of a young girl . . . who fell in this roaring spout where the surf came in and out. It caught her and dragged her in. They couldn’t save her, and she floated down past Allen Island to Pemaquid, and they picked up her body eight days later . . . still draped in a long skirt. I kept thinking of that girl’s body floating under water. The nets became her spirit. The nets were like fog. One was made of synthetic nylon and had a blueish cast. I tried doing it with a brush but couldn’t get that fineness, that strange cold blue. So I went to a very sharp pencil, scoring into the gesso." - Andrew Wyeth
Reflection
Wyeth disclosed the clandestine Helga paintings in 1986. But the ridicule in response to the sensationalized story—was she his model or his mistress?—and the controversial sale of the pictures for a staggering, record-setting price left him defensive about his art and unsure of his next move.
In 1987 Wyeth turned seventy, and in a state of reflection he began the large tempera Snow Hill, which conjures all the characters from the artist’s Chadds Ford pictures, some living, most long dead, and brings them together in a festive Yuletide round dance atop Kuerner’s Hill. Wyeth used the painting to say goodbye to these characters, to dance them off to their art-muse graves, and he would never enlist them again, even though he painted for another twenty years. Casting about for new subjects, Wyeth would symbolically reference his own advancing age and the quickening end to life.
North Light - 1984 - Watercolor on paper.
"A great window fills the north side of N.C. Wyeth’s grand painting studio. It speaks of the famous man’s outsize character and ambition. The elder Wyeth had designed and built his Chadds Ford home and studio with money he received from his very first commission, in 1911, the celebrated illustrations for Treasure Island. Son Andrew grew up here and formally entered his father’s studio as a student on October 19, 1932. After N.C. Wyeth was tragically killed by an oncoming train, on October 19, 1945, his children maintained the studio ever after as a shrine. When Andrew Wyeth painted this symbolic “portrait” of his father, he was in a deeply reflective mood. The secret of painting Helga was now strained to breaking, and Wyeth’s art making and personal life would soon be upended."
Wheel Gate (study for Me) - 2007 - Watercolor on foamboard.
"Ice plays with our perception here, and Wyeth’s manipulation of ink and paint makes it difficult to read the picture as anything but an abstraction. Try orienting yourself. The view is to the old wheel gate of the gristmill on Wyeth’s property on the Brandywine River in Chadds Ford. When the mill was in operation, the race water would rush, swift and powerful, through the open gate, through the mill, and then turn the huge wooden waterwheel inside."
The Carry - 2003 - Tempera on hardboard panel.
"Painted when Wyeth was eighty-six years old, The Carry makes use of the time-honored symbolic associations that a river’s torrent has with humankind’s voyage of life. It’s not a surprising subject for a painter meditating on the quickening end to his days. The torrent has been made more immediate, more powerful, by new painterly approaches to tempera painting that Wyeth had not considered when he was young. Tempera is very thinly applied here in places, like watercolor, and broadly brushed. The loose technique allowed Wyeth to paint more rapidly as he painted against time."
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