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Christina's World
Wyeth painted Christina's World at his home farm in Cushing, Maine.
One of America's most famous landscape
paintings, it depicts his neighbour Christina Olson sprawled on a
field, with her back to the viewer, as she faces her own farmhouse in
the distance. Due to polio, the real-life Christina was unable to walk
and was often spotted by her neighbour crawling across the field. To Wyeth
she was an inspiration 'limited physically but by no means spiritually'.
He said 'the challenge to me was to do justice to her extraordinary conquest
of a life which most people would consider hopeless.' The painting is
vastly spacious and invites the viewer to create their own narrative.
This invitation to narrate was something his contemporary Edward
Hopper would master, and which would encourage many other artists
to try the same, including the popular Scottish artist Jack
Vettriano.
Mistress Collection
Wyeth typically enjoyed painting vacant wooden houses marked by time,
along with deserted rooms which contained details symbolic of a severe
life. He often created dozens of studies, sketches and watercolours before
beginning a painting. He varied the media he used from watercolour
painting, dry brush and egg tempera.
He avoided the use of oil paints. Christina's World was in fact
executed with egg tempera. Wyeth also practised portrait
art, including a series of paintings of a mistress that only became
public years later. Between 1971 and 1985 Wyeth created over 240 studies
of his neighbour Helga Testorf. These studies were carried out without
the knowledge of either participants' partners. In these studies, Helga
rarely smiles, yet Wyeth manages to convey a variety of moods and characteristics
of his model. The collection was exhibited at the National
Gallery of Art in 1987 and went on to tour various other museums and
art galleries.
The Regionalism Movement in America
Like Grant Wood (1892-1942), Wyeth's work
can be categorised as Regionalist. Regionalism
was an American Realist art movement which was popular during the 1930s.
(It was the midwest version of the broader movement known as American
Scene Painting.) Regionalist artists shunned city life, preferring
to paint the dustbowls and small towns of America. Other popular exponents
were Thomas Hart Benton (1889-1975)
and John Steuart Curry (1897-1946). The movement gained popularity during
the Great Depression, for its reassuring, warm images of the American
heartland. Proponents of Regionalism supported realism as a defence against
the influence of abstract art which was rapidly arriving from Europe.
The debate between the merits of Regionalism, Abstraction and Social Realism
raged in America throughout the 1920s and 1930s. By the 1940s two very
clear camps had emerged: Regionalism and Social Realism on the one side
and Abstract Expressionism on the other. Regionalism's subsequent loss
of status in the art world was mainly due to the ultimate triumph of abstract
art. However, many art critics argue that Regionalism played an important
role in linking Academic Realism and Abstract Expressionism, in the way
that the Neo-Impressionists like Van Gogh, Paul Gaugin and Cezanne were
able to provide a bridge from Impressionism to Fauvism, Expressionism,
Futurism and Cubism.
Exhibitions
In 1950 an exhibition entitled Symbolic Realism in American Painting
was held at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, which was a retrospective
of Wyeth's works from the previous decade. In 1954 he participated in
a group exhibition at the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, which focused
on a comparison of Realism and Abstract American art. Wyeth was an avid
sketcher, and an exhibition of his drawings, watercolours and tempera
works were exhibited in 1967 at the Oklahoma Museum of Art. In 1976 he
was greatly honoured with a retrospective at the prestigious Metropolitan
Museum of Art in New York. In 1978 he represented the States at the
Biennale Internationale d'Art in Paris. In the late 1980's Wyeth's 'Helga'
paintings and sketches were exhibited in museums worldwide, including
the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco and
the Palazzo Reale, Milan. In 1995 a major retrospective of the artist's
work was held at the Aichi Perfectural Museum in Japan, and again in 2009
after the artist's death.
Art Critics
Wyeth has been much criticised for his popularity in artist circles. Although
some claim he is an outstanding exemplar of Realism,
others counter that when his works are viewed together they reveal very
little power of observation. In quantity, they say his paintings reveal
themselves to be quite mundane and routine. (For a more gritty realism,
see George Wesley Bellows (1882-1925)
and other members of the New York Ashcan
school.) Although museum retrospectives of his work always draw huge
crowds, it did not stop a Village Voice art critic from opining
that Wyeth's paintings are 'formulaic stuff, not very effective even as
illustrational realism.' But advocates of Wyeth say his paintings are
highly emotive, symbolic and carry an underlying abstraction. (See also
the critics' reaction to Norman Rockwell,
the populist American illustrator.)
Wyeth died in January 2009, at the grand
age of 91. Today, as one of the great 20th
century painters of America, Wyeth's works can be seen in many of
the best art museums, including the Whitney
Museum, the Museum of Modern Art NY, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the
Smithsonian American Art Museum; Nelson-Atkins Museum (Kansas); Arkansas
Art Center and the White House. A major retrospective of his work was
held at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2006. In 1977 Wyeth became the
first American painter, since John Singer
Sargent to be elected to the Academy of Beaux-Arts in Paris. He received
the National Medal of Arts in 2007 from US President Bush.
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