...I also really like the phrase “magical realism”...
A couple of years ago I had to write about the magical realism of Gabriel García Márquez... I can say that at the time this term puzzled me. Somehow this definition seemed strangely far-fetched and far-fetched...
But recently I realized that it still exists, this magical realism.
*and I also thought now that probably only Andrew Wyeth could illustrate Marquez without distorting the essence...
Yes, all this is wonderful, but family first!
Yes, yes... nepotism again...
Andrew Wyeth's father, Newell Converse Wyeth.
Newell Converse Wyeth(eng. Newell Convers Wyeth, also known as N.C. Wyeth, 1882-1945) - painter, illustrator, founder of the Wyeth dynasty. He is known as an illustrator of children's books published by Charles Screenbears Sans, including Tom Sawyer, Robinson Crusoe, and Treasure Island.
Newell Converse took art seriously. He had a steady focus, an intellectual passion and the life of his workshop was at the center. When Wyeth's children went into business for themselves, they witnessed their father's work habits and a steady stream of publishers and art directors to his workshop at Chadds Ford. They were encouraged to start their own business. Their independent jobs were within easy reach and they took an interest in each other's work. It was reported that they hid like snails when so-called "curious" people came to their homestead to waste their time. At the same time, Newell Converse turned his workshop into a developed and informal school. He patronized young promising artists and often found accommodation for them nearby. Each in his family was encouraged to pursue his own direction: Anne Wyeth composed her first symphony when she was not yet twenty years old; Nathaniel Wyeth became an inventive scientist; Andrew Wyeth became one of the best known painters of his time.
(Wikipedia)
Andrew Wyeth's son, "Jamie" Wyeth.
James Browning "Jamie" Wyeth (born July 6, 1946, Wilmington, Delaware, USA) is a contemporary American realist artist. The son of the artist Andrew Wyeth and the grandson of the outstanding illustrator Newell Wyeth.
Jamie Wyeth was born in Wilmington, Delaware, and grew up nearby in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. From adolescence, he attracted public attention as the third generation of famous American artists. In 1966, his first personal exhibition took place. His work became widely known with the opening of the Brandywine River Museum in Chadds Ford in 1971, where large collection three generations Wyeth's.
He visited the USSR twice in 1975 and 1987. In 1987, he opened the exhibition An American Vision: Three Generations of Wyeth Art in Leningrad. (Wikipedia)
And finally, himself... Andrew Newell Wyeth.
(eng. Andrew Newell Wyeth, July 12, 1917, Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, USA - January 16, 2009, ibid.) - American realist artist, one of the most prominent representatives fine arts USA of the 20th century. Son of the outstanding illustrator Newell Converse Wyeth, brother of the inventor Nathaniel Wyeth and artist Henrietta Wyeth Heard, father of the artist Jamie Wyeth.
The main theme of Wyeth's works is provincial life and American nature. Basically, his paintings depict his surroundings hometown Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, and Cushing, Maine, where the artist lived in the summer. He used tempera and watercolor (with the exception of early experiments with oil).
Andrew was youngest child in the family of Newell Converse and Caroline Wyeth. He studied at home due to poor health. He began to draw early and studied painting with his father. Wyeth studied art history on his own.
Andrew Wyeth's first solo exhibition of watercolors took place in New York in 1937, when he was 20 years old. All the works exhibited there were sold out quite quickly. Early in his career, Wyeth also did some book illustrating like his father, but soon stopped doing so.
In 1940, Wyeth married Betsy James. In 1943, the couple had a son, Nicholas, and three years later their second child, James (Jamie), was born. In 1945, Wyeth lost his father (he died in a disaster). Around this time, Wyeth's realistic style was finally formed. (Wikipedia)
“We are born and live in a world of fantastic reality” (G. Marquez)
Christina's World, one of Wyeth's most famous paintings
The painting shows Christina Olson, Wyeth's neighbor at his summer home in Maine, sitting in a field looking at her home. Christina Olson suffered from the effects of polio, and her determination and fortitude amazed Wyeth. Despite the fact that the image of Christina is presented in the painting, his wife, Betsy Wyeth, posed for the artist. The artist wrote about her: “Christina was limited physically, but not spiritually.”
“I deliberately don’t like to travel. After traveling you never come back the same – you become more erudite... I’m afraid of losing something important for my work, maybe naivety.”
From the diaries of Andrew Wyeth
The famous and most controversial American artist Andrew Wyeth, a representative of realism, and later magical realism, really was a convinced homebody. Having spent his entire life in just two places in the United States, he had no regrets. For him, the hills and valleys of his hometown of Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, and the town of Cushing, located on the ocean coast of Maine, where the artist and his family went for the summer, were filled with deep meaning. In his paintings we will see landscapes of only these places at different times of the year. Although the artist himself preferred to paint winter and autumn, believing that at this time of year his skeleton is revealed in the landscape. For Andrew Wyeth, it was the inner, hidden in the depths, frame on which everything else rests that was always interesting. To feel, to see this inner essence, the artist could lie on the ground for hours, peering at a small twig or flower - “getting used to their existence.”
In the work of Andrew Wyeth, the features characteristic of the American realistic tradition are palpable: the idealization of farm America, a passion for native places, for the accuracy of the image of the visible, sometimes close to topographical illusoryness. But all this, combined with his inherent subtle poetic perception of reality, allows us to connect him with the direction of magical realism. There's always a certain tension with Andrew Wyeth. It is more surreal than realistic.
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| Dil Huey Farm 1941 |
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| Blackberry Picker 1943 |
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| Spring Beauty (1943) |
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| Quaker Ladies, 1956 |
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| Sarita, 1978 |
They say that once, when asked by USSR art officials to submit paintings with blacks to his Moscow exhibition, the artist replied that he did not paint blacks, he painted friends.
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| Christinas World (Christina's World) 1948 |
Andrew Wyeth once saw her from the window of his workshop, crawling home across the field. At the first moment, the artist wanted to rush to help his neighbor, but something stopped him. He said later that Christina, with her absurd but persistent movements towards the house, reminded him of a lobster shell thrown ashore and crushed, which continues to move towards the sea. In her movement he saw the quintessence inner strength Christina - a spiritual (uncrushed) shell, thanks to which she endured bodily infirmities with dignity. What he saw inspired Andrew Wyeth so much that he began creating the painting. Afterwards, Christina more than once became a character, a model for the artist’s paintings.
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| Corner of the Woods 1954 |
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| Albert's son 1959 |
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| Master Bedroom 1965 |
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| Spring Fed 1967 |
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| Sea Boots 1976 |
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| Full Moon 1980 |
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| Adrift (Adrift) 1982 |
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| Moon Madness 1982 |
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| Airborne 1996 |
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| Embers 2000 |
In 1955, Andrew Wyeth became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and in 1977 he was elected a member of the French Academy. fine arts, in 1978 he became an honorary member of the USSR Academy of Arts, and in 1980 he was elected to the British Royal Academy. In 1963, President John Kennedy awarded the artist America's highest civilian honor, the Medal of Freedom. And in 1970, Wyeth became the first artist whose paintings were exhibited at the White House during the lifetime of their creator.
In 2007, the artist was awarded the National Medal of Arts, which was presented to him at the White House by US President George W. Bush.
In an interview with Time magazine, the artist said about himself: “The longer I stay with an object, a thing or a living sitter, or a landscape, the more I see what I didn’t notice in it before, I was blind. And I begin to penetrate into the essence, deeper see". Denying realism in his work, he called himself a surrealist: “I eat not what I see, but what I feel.” He said that he did not feel committed to any one school, believing that the main thing in creativity is not technique, but emotional tension.
Andrew Wyeth lived a long and rich life. Andrew was born in the small town of Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania on July 12, 1917, the fifth child in the family of the popular US illustrator and painter Newell Converse Wyeth. The future artist was a sickly boy and his parents, protecting his health, gave their son a home education. His father taught little Andrew not only reading, writing and mathematics, but also gave him his first painting lessons. “My father said: “For a child’s life to be creative, he must have his own world, belonging only to him.” I started drawing very early, and my father believed that an artist did not need college: I was taught by a teacher who came to my home, my father himself and his artist friends. And he achieved his goal." The father taught his son that the main thing in painting is color, especially if you are painting a country like America. The son objected: " Great country It does not need bright colors, but bright people. Greatness is in simplicity. And the simplest and most natural color is gray, the color of ordinary earth, which has been trampled by the shoe of a farmer, whose face, like the earth, has been weathered by the winds and deprived of color by the sweat of the one who works on the land." At the beginning of his career, Wyeth also did a little illustrating books, like his father, but soon stopped doing so.
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| Story 27, 1930-40 |
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| Maga's Daughter (portrait of his wife), 1966 |
But being herself a free and brave soul, Betsy, it seems, did not notice how she had enslaved the elf, whimsical spirit of the artist, who was also striving for freedom. She energetically and skillfully sold and distributed his paintings, cataloged them, created an archive, until she gave Wyeth the feeling (as he writes) that he was “an object of sale.” The youngest of the two Wyeth sons, Jamie, also an artist, either jokingly or seriously said that he once reached into a desk drawer and saw a photograph of his father with a number on his forehead. Relations between the spouses became strained, and Andrew increasingly disappeared with his easel. The biographer says: “One day in the Körner house, he heard an unfamiliar voice speaking German. It was Helga, the daughter of Karl’s acquaintances, who was hired to help around the house. She was young, beautiful, natural, and she had the charm of a foreigner. Andrew was inspired. The fact is that he almost consciously arranged his life in such a way that emotional tension was constantly created in it: delight, fear, foreboding, and all - an irrepressible, infectious force... Secret work began on a series of paintings “Helga and More”. He told two friends: “If anything happens to me, there is a collection of paintings in the Koerners’ attic.” If he revealed his secret to Betsy, it would kill his inner excitement, and then the whole idea would be over.”
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| Winter (Winter, 1946) |
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| The German (1975) |
The fields, meadows, forests and hills of Chadds Ford became for him not just his homeland, but a meeting place with his greatest love. In the winter of 1971, in the Koerner house, he heard a new female voice, who spoke German. It was Helga Thurstoff, the 32-year-old daughter of Karl’s acquaintances, who was hired to help around the house... She entered Wyeth’s life new love. Secret work began on the series of paintings “Helga”.
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| Braids (Braids, 1977, Seattle Art Museum) |
According to Wyeth, "it was a decisive, turning point in his life." He looked into her gray, pensive northern eyes and realized that he wanted to live and write again. He asked: “What is your name?” But his heart already knew - no matter what her name was, no matter where she lived - he could not forget this blond hair, this delicate wheat fluff over her upper lip, this shy blush on her pale cheeks. “A man freed from the random circumstances of time” is, perhaps, the theme of his work with Helga.
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| Overflow, 1978 |
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| Lovers (1981) |
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| On Her Knees (Siri), 1987 |
Intuition and imagination are a surer way of knowing the truth than abstract logic or the scientific method. Following Whitman, the artist Wyeth brings American art of the twentieth century to the world level, because he sees in every person traits that are characteristic not only of the inhabitants of America, but of all people of the Earth. In the simple woman Helga, who worked on a neighboring farm, he discovers a whole world and perceives it as part of the Universe. Even painting her naked, he seems to understand that this is just part of that continent called the soul. Helga's eyes and her unique sad smile are permeated with a special feeling of life. Through his love, the artist reflects on old age, youth, death and life. Their relationship could be guessed from the long walks around Maine that Andrew Wyeth and Helga loved so much. She walked and looked forward all the time, looking for something, often she could not see and turned to Andrew. And he hastily made sketches. In his eyes, Helga saw a reflection of what was ahead, and he added something of himself to this reflection. What were they looking for in this small patch of Chadds Ford under the huge snowy sky above? Common sense? Happiness? Or the peace and quiet that the human heart so needs? The most ordinary things: the turning of the beloved’s head, the wind behind her, open window- Wyeth s great power managed to raise the artist to an unusually emotional height. He, like Salinger's hero Holden Caulfield, carefully guards his little girl playing in the rye. Of course, the experience of generations was not in vain for Wyeth; a kind of fusion took place in his creative consciousness, and in the portraits of Helga one can equally see Durer’s completeness and the Renaissance principles of picture space. But this is only the sum of its parts. The main thing is not this. The main thing is these always lively eyes the color of icy water, this affectionate mischief in the corners of her plump mouth, and also her tenderness, like light snow, swift, flying...
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| Refuge (1985) |
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| The Omen (Omen), 1997 |
“A great country does not need bright colors, but bright people. Greatness is in simplicity. And the simplest and most natural color is gray, the color of ordinary earth, which has been trampled by the shoe of a farmer, whose face, like the earth, has been weathered by the winds and deprived of its color by the sweat of the one who works on the land.”
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| Walking Stick (2002) |
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| Other world (2002) |
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| Dr. Sin, 1981 |
Critics have called him America's most overrated and most underrated artist. This is not so much a paradox as a statement of fact. Everyone knows Wyeth, but no one knows why.
The closest to the answer were enemies and rivals.
“There are no colors in this painting,” they say, “his paintings are as dead as boards.”
That's how it is. Wyeth wrote the world as brown and withered. His people do not smile, and things are neither new, nor interesting, nor full: if there is a bucket, then it is empty, if if there is a house, then it is askew, if if it is a field, then it is barren.
Andrew Wyeth is unique because he defied the tide of time by insisting on his definition of an artist. The fact is that, having ceased to be a craftsman, the modern artist tried other roles - thinker, poet, demiurge, and finally, holy fool, like the dog-man Kulik. Gradually, painting turned away from the world and began to express itself. Dictating her own laws to the viewer, she forbade comparing herself with reality. Wyeth, however, still believed in her and tried to find her, searching not on his own, but on her terms.
“In my paintings,” he explained his method, “I don’t change things, but wait for them to change me.”
It was a long wait, but Wyeth was in no hurry and wrote the same thing all his life - neighboring farms, neighboring hills, neighbors. The poverty of his plots is declarative, and his philosophy is alien and enviable.
Spying on things, Wyeth discovered their silent life, which is eerily fascinating. Other paintings pretend to be a window; his is a well. Having sunk to the bottom, Wyeth stopped changing, remaining himself to the end.
His favorite time of year is late autumn. There is no snow yet, there are no leaves anymore, summer is forgotten, spring is in doubt. Stuck in the mud, nature does not flicker, it looks serious, eternal. Like her, the artist guards not the instantaneous, like the impressionists, but the unchangeable, like theologians. Walking behind them, he depicts a threshold that marks the boundary of the comprehensible. Having reached it, the artist looks into something that has no name, but allows itself to be saturated. Like a hex witch, Wyeth instilled nostalgia in the viewer. Things become yours, people become loved ones, the landscape becomes your home, even if it is a cowshed.
Looking at this very barn - the blinding whiteness of the walls, the muted shine of the tin, the uncertain snow on the hill - it seems that you have already seen this in another, but also your own life. By tearing out the fragment that is calloused by his eye and giving it the highest status of intensity, the artist implants a false memory in the viewer. Not a symbol, not an allegory, but that part of reality that serves as a catalyst for an uncontrollable reaction. By shifting the external to the internal, she transforms the material into experience.
Unable to describe transmutation in words, critics habitually call Wyeth's realism magical. But his cows do not fly, like Chagall’s, but quietly graze on the hill visible from the window. Fantasy is not in detachment, but in materialization.
I have only seen something like this in Tarkovsky’s Solaris. In the film, the intelligent Ocean takes out not only people, but still lifes and landscapes from the subconscious of the heroes. Since we are transparent to the Ocean, it does not know how to distinguish consciousness from subconsciousness and materializes the brightest - radioactive - clots of experience accumulated in the soul. This is what Andrew Wyeth portrays in his works.
Alexander Genis
Andrew Newell Wyeth (English Andrew Newell Wyeth, July 12, 1917, Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, USA - January 16, 2009, ibid.) - American realist artist, one of the most prominent representatives of US fine art of the 20th century. Son of the distinguished illustrator Newell Converse Wyeth, brother of inventor Nathaniel Wyeth and artist Henrietta Wyeth Heard, father of artist Jamie Wyeth.
The main theme of Wyeth's works is provincial life and American nature. His paintings primarily depict the area around his hometown of Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, and Cushing, Maine, where he lived during the summer. He used tempera and watercolor (with the exception of early experiments with oil).
Andrew was the youngest child of Newell Converse and Caroline Wyeth. He studied at home due to poor health. He began to draw early and studied painting with his father. Wyeth studied art history on his own.
Andrew Wyeth's first solo exhibition of watercolors took place in New York in 1937, when he was 20 years old. All the works exhibited there were sold out quite quickly. Early in his career, Wyeth also did some book illustrating like his father, but soon stopped doing so.
In 1940, Wyeth married Betsy James. In 1943, the couple had a son, Nicholas, and three years later their second child, James (Jamie), was born. In 1945, Wyeth lost his father (he died in a disaster). Around this time, Wyeth's realistic style was finally formed.
In 1948, Wyeth wrote his most famous painting, "Christina's World," on the Olsen family farm in Maine. The painting depicts Christina Olsen. Throughout the subsequent time, Wyeth alternately lived in Pennsylvania and Maine, almost never leaving the east coast of the United States. The artist's style remained virtually unchanged, although over time Wyeth's paintings became more symbolic, moving away from
American painting is practically unknown in Russia; many believe that there is no art at all in the USA, so legendary painting I came across "Christina's World" by artist Andrew Wyeth quite by accident - and was amazed to the core. Almost all of my long life(1917 - 2009) Andrew lived in Maine and painted mainly the surrounding nature and people he knew. From a scientific point of view, he worked in the style of realism, in the light of the modern fashion of “magical realism” (I immediately remembered the “socialist realism” of another era). His works caused a skeptical reaction from critics, but were always liked ordinary people. In America he was called the artist of the common people and the singer of the north.
Andrew Wyeth Christina's World Andrew Wyeth Christina's World (1948)
The painting depicts the artist's neighbor Christina Olsen. After suffering from polio in childhood, she could not walk.
Christina could move in a wheelchair, but then she would have to constantly ask her loved ones to carry her. She didn’t want to bother them; she wanted, even in this way, to maintain freedom of movement, and therefore a certain personal freedom. Andrew Wyeth once saw her from the window of his workshop, crawling home across the field. At the first moment, the artist wanted to rush to help his neighbor, but something stopped him. He said later that Christina, with her absurd but persistent movements towards the house, reminded him of a lobster shell thrown ashore and crushed, which continues to move towards the sea. In her movement, he saw the quintessence of Christina’s inner strength - a spiritual (undowered) shell, thanks to which she endured bodily infirmities with dignity. What he saw inspired Andrew Wyeth so much that he began creating the painting. Afterwards, Christina more than once became a character, a model for the artist’s paintings. Christina seems young, although she was 53 years old at that time (she died in 1969).
In 1965, he even said in frustration that there was "too much plot" in Christina's World. “I would be better off without Christina at all,” he said, not without challenge.
This painting not only amazed his contemporaries and glorified the author worldwide, but also provoked fierce attacks from critics. As, indeed, all of his work. Wyeth was outraged by the lack of “originality”, innovation, “progress”, social criticism and politics, his opposition to fashion in art of the post-war years. In subsequent decades, he was reproached either for illustrativeness, or for excessive sensitivity, “cloying sentimentality,” tearfulness, or for a morbid addiction to the painful, terrible, perverted, or pathology. The artist, who captured the world of rural America, was contemptuously compared to the idol of housewives, Martha Stewart, who on TV and in her home economics magazine gives advice on how to furnish a house, how to cook deliciously in the American way... Or that he creates a “semblance of Williamsburg” , a museum of antiquities that must be viewed “from the height of a helicopter.”
In 1940, Andrew Wyeth married Betsy James, who soon became the “head of the family” of the artist, influencing him even more than his father during his lifetime, managing his affairs for almost seven decades, giving practical advice on painting... what, however, it did not prevent him, a man by nature independent and “solitary,” from creating many works in secret from her, and she learned about them only as years passed.
He painted landscapes and portraits of ordinary people he knew and loved, farmers. In particular, from 1940 to 1968, Christina Olsen and her younger brother Alvaro posed for him, and from 1948 to 1979 he painted portraits of his friends Karl and Anna Körner. The German Karl passed through the first world war, served in the German army... He considered the painting “Karl” from 1948 to be the best of his portraits.
Distant Thunder ("portrait" of his wife) 1961
The Koerner farm has also become a museum and is open to the public. Both families, the Olsens and the Koerners, entered art history thanks to the artist. He painted the neighbor girl Sira Erickson naked for many years, but showed the nudes he made to people only when she was 21 years old. She started posing nude for him at the age of 13, without feeling embarrassed: “He’s always at work, he looks at you like you’re a tree.” This is how she recalls her communication with “Andy” (close people simply called him) when she was already 32 years old.
He loved to paint nudes. Not using the services of professional models in the rural wilderness, he asked his neighbors, young and not so young, to pose for him; they trusted his modesty and chastity and were not embarrassed by him, as was the case with Sira Erickson. At the same time, the artist did not want to embarrass anyone with erotic paintings, especially the families of his voluntary models, and even his own wife. So the canvases and drawings made “for oneself” were kept for years before being put on public display. Income from the sale of two or three paintings a year satisfied his material needs, and he could not rush to publish his works.
The greatest of American artists, Andrew Wyeth, was born on July 12, 1917 in Chads Ford, Pennsylvania, the fifth and youngest child in the family of artist Nevell Wyeth. Due to poor health, he had to receive his education at home, and his main teacher was his father, who also gave him his first lessons in artistic skill. Andrew also did a lot of independent research into the history of painting and literature. His favorite painters included the Renaissance masters and American realists, especially Winslow Homer, and his favorite writers were Henry Thoreau and Robert Frost.
Andrew started drawing very early - at first watercolor paints, then egg tempera, to which he owes the later famous muted tonality of his paintings. Oil paints the artist has never used it. In 1937, the first solo exhibition of watercolors by twenty-year-old Wyeth, depicting landscapes of Maine, took place in New York. All the works presented there were quickly sold out, which confirmed the artist in the correctness of his choice. life path. In 1940, he married Betsy James, who became not only his wife, but also a sensitive friend, loyal ally and public relations agent.
“I paint these hills around Chad’s Ford not because they are better than the hills in other places, but because I was born here, lived here - they are full of meaning to me.”
In 1945, Andrew Wyeth's father died in a train accident. The painful feeling of loss is expressed in the painting “Winter”, painted shortly after. Losing yourself loved one became a turning point not only in his personal life, but also in Wyeth’s work. It was after this that his painting finally acquired characteristic features a style that brought him first all-American and then world fame. This style has been described in many different ways, but perhaps it is best described as “mystical hyperrealism.” “Lord, when I start to really look at something, at a simple object, and become aware of it hidden meaning, if I begin to feel it, there is no end to it,” these are the words the artist himself described the process of his creativity. The meticulously detailed details of the surrounding world on Wyeth’s canvases open the door to infinity, the images lead to prototypes.
“I think and dream a lot about past and future things - the eternity of rocks and hills - all those people who lived here. I prefer winter and autumn, when the landscape feels its skeletal frame - its loneliness - the dead feeling of winter. Something is lurking below, something remains hidden.”
After the death of his father, Andrew Wyeth begins to spend the summer months around the town of Cushing in Maine. The nature of New England acquires the same rights in his canvases as the nature of his native Pennsylvania. It was in Cushing, on family farm Olsonov, Wyeth in 1948 wrote his most famous painting, which became an iconic work of all American painting of the 20th century, “Christina’s World.” It may seem paradoxical that one of the symbols of America has become the image of a girl crawling across a field with paralyzed legs. And in general it is difficult to find something further from the dominant one in modern mass consciousness image of the USA than the endlessly lonely heroes of Wyeth’s paintings, immersed in deep melancholy. However, this did not stop him from purchasing huge amount fans and become popular in the true sense of the word American artist. And the point here is hardly just his figurative language, understandable to ordinary people and ridiculed by narrow-minded people art critics as “simple illustration”. Along with the America of Manhattan and Hollywood, there is also the America of Chads-Ford and Cushing, and which of them is real is still a question.
“I think people always find sad pictures that are contemplative and silent, that represent a person alone. Is it really because we have lost the art of being alone?”
From the late forties and for almost three decades, members of the Olson family and their farm were constant subjects of Wyeth's paintings. The same friendly and creative relations connected the artist with the Kuerner family and farm, who were his neighbors in Chadz Ford. Currently both of these farms are memorable places, attracting thousands of fans of the artist. In 1958, Wyeth purchased “The Mill,” an eighteenth-century structure in the vicinity of his Pennsylvania home that has since become a recurring feature in his paintings. Along with familiar people and their homes, Wyeth's main source of inspiration was the nature of Pennsylvania and New England, which he loved to immerse himself in during his long solitary walks. After the death of Christina Olson in 1969, new female heroines appeared on the artist’s canvases - Siri Erickson and especially Helga Testorf, to whom he dedicated an outstanding series of two and a half hundred sketches and paintings written from 1970 to 1985. Helga was an emigrant from Germany , who worked in the Kuerners' house. She immediately attracted the attention of Wyeth, who later recalled: “I could not get out of my head the image of that high-cheekboned Prussian face with wide-set eyes framed by blond hair.”
Wyeth was a singer of the North - the northeastern United States primarily, but also feeling a deep kinship with the land of his ancestors in northern Europe. It is no coincidence that in his paintings there are so many natives of these places - Germans, Swedes, Finns. Echoes of Nordic legends are present in many of his paintings, such as the 1982 painting “Adrift”. She represents the artist’s old friend, fisherman Walt Anderson, sleeping in a boat floating with the current, the image of which evokes memories of the rituals with which the Vikings sent their comrades to the other world.
Wyeth's work is deeply religious, although this religiosity is almost never expressed directly. One of the few exceptions is the 1944 painting “Christmas Morning,” which the artist painted under the impression of the death of his longtime friend Mrs. Sanderson. In an unusual surrealistic manner, Wyeth strives to depict the transition human soul from one world to another, death as a continuation of the journey, as birth into a new life. The same theme is present in many of the artist’s other works, although this can often only be understood if you know the circumstances of their creation. Thus, in the 1993 film “Marriage”, Wyeth depicts the death of his friends, the Sipal couple, whose souls leave their bodies and escape through an open window, and in the 1989 film “Pentecost” (“Pentecost”) the wind that shakes the fishing nets on Allen Island represents the soul of a young woman who had recently drowned there. One can rightly recognize Andrew Wyeth as an exponent in painting of the same religious spirit of the American Northeast that literary means was expressed—primarily in the Four Quartets—by his elder contemporary Thomas Stearns Eliot, who was closely connected with New England by family and spiritual ties.
“I am convinced that an artist’s art can only overcome the distance that his love can overcome.”
Retrospective of Wyeth's works Art Museum Philadelphia attracted more than 175,000 visitors in 2006, setting a world record for exhibition attendance contemporary artist. The last recognition of Wyeth's talent during his lifetime was the award of the US National Medal of Arts in 2007, and since 2008 he stopped appearing in public and giving interviews. In response to requests from journalists who wanted to meet with him, he said: “Everything I could say is already hanging on the walls.” Andrew Wyeth passed away peacefully in his sleep at his home in Chad's Ford on January 16, 2009 at the age of 91.
“When I die, don't worry about me. I don't think I'll attend my funeral. Remember this. I will be somewhere far away, walking along a new path. Which is twice as good as before.”
Cooling Shed
Dil Huey Farm
Distant Thunder
In the Orchard
Master Bedroom
Retread Freds
The Kuners
The Revenant
The Witching Hour
Trodden Weed
Wind from the Sea
Winter Fields
Witches Broom
Night Sleeper
Black Velvet
Battleground
Afternoon Flight
Walking Stick
Christmas Morning
Chimney Swift
Charlie Ervine
Christina Olson
End of Olsons
Christina's World
Artist Andrew Wyeth is considered a classic of American painting. It’s hard to say whether fate would have been so merciful to him if he had not painted one picture – “Christina’s World”. What kind of Christina is this that so easily decided the artist’s fate?
Andrew's father, known as "N.K.", was also a popular illustrator. He taught his son that the main thing in painting is color, especially if you are painting a country like America. The son objected:
– A great country does not need bright colors, but bright people. Greatness is in simplicity. And the simplest and most natural color is gray, the color of ordinary earth, which has been trampled by the shoe of a farmer, whose face, like the earth, has been weathered by the winds and deprived of its color by the sweat of the one who works on the land.
The father did not agree. And Andrew didn’t argue. He simply took an easel and ran away for the summer to some American outback, where no one could find him. This is how he saw creative freedom. In 1947, Wyeth settled in Cushing, Maine. From the attic in which he set up his studio, one could see a field, an unpainted barn in the distance and lots and lots of sky. In a word: a charming American hole. The proximity to the ocean made the houses in Cushing colorless and featureless, like a faded field. But people did not yet know the word “snobbery” and therefore were not similar to each other. Not like in San Francisco or New York, where everyone seemed to come out of the same hair salon on 42nd Street.
Immediately upon his arrival, Andrew stopped by his neighbors, the Olsons, for some small change. I looked in for a minute and was stuck for a good two hours. And no wonder. There was a magnet in the living room that attracted young artist, – Olson’s daughter Christina. “The girl with the face of a fairy,” Andrew immediately dubbed her, but, of course, he didn’t dare say it out loud.
While Christina’s mother was preparing fruit juice for the guest under a canopy in the yard, the girl entertained young man with an ingenuous story about their log house, which, it turns out, was built by her grandmother. Built as an inn for sailors. Sailors love quiet harbors. Here is one sailor from Gothenburg who settled forever in the “Cushing harbor”. His surname, naturally, was purely Swedish - Olson. So in the “charming American hole” the Olson family took root.
Wyeth left this “safe haven” with great reluctance, although one detail embarrassed him a little: when he first entered the living room, the girl, as is customary in the American outback, did not get up from her chair to greet the guest. She sat there for two hours, throwing an old blanket over her knees. Maybe she didn’t like Andrew for some reason?..
Days passed. The young artist drew sketches and sketches. But I never saw Christina again. And then one day, looking out of the window of his “studio” in the attic, he saw Christina. She lay down on a field not far away and was clearly resting. A thought flashed through Andrew's mind: how can you rest in such an uncomfortable position? But then something completely incredible happened. Christina began to crawl across the field towards the house in the distance. I wanted to rush to help her, but something seemed to grip Andrew’s whole body, as if paralyzed. The picture was surreal: a field scorched by the sun and on it a female figure in a pink dress. Like a lobster shell stepped on by a merciless boot. But the lobster did not die - it crawled, dragging its shell behind it. And with this he has already won the fight for life.
Wyeth later learned that Christina suffered a serious illness as a child and remained paralyzed for the rest of her life. But the granddaughter of a Swedish sailor, she inherited not only a log house, but also courage, and the thirst for life gradually created a new shell - a new inner world, incomprehensible to other people. The world of Christina Olson. It was impossible to penetrate it, it could only be accepted and bowed to.
That summer in Cushing, artist Andrew Wyeth understood the main thing: there was no need to look for a loophole into Christina’s world. You just can't forget about him. It is easier for an artist to do this than for everyone else - for the sake of your memory and that of your descendants, you can capture it on canvas. Moreover, life has already come up with a name for this - “Christina’s World”. It contains a sun-scorched field, a lot of sky and a heart under pink dress choking on life.