Occupying two floors at the Brandywine River Museum of Art, the new “Andrew Wyeth: In Retrospect” exhibition celebrates the 100th anniversary of the Chadds Ford master painter’s birth.
The first major Andrew Wyeth retrospective since his death in 2009, it features more than 100 works spanning seven decades of the artist’s career – from the boldly colorful early watercolors that established his reputation to his poignant final painting, “Goodbye,” completed just a few months before he died. According to Thomas Padon, the James H. Duff Director of the Brandywine River Museum of Art, it’s the largest Andrew Wyeth retrospective the museum has ever presented, and is co-organized by the Brandywine River Museum and the Seattle Art Museum.
“You get a unique insight into this artists’s work. He is such an important figure here … a beloved member of this community,” Padon said, noting that a lot of work went into securing loans of Wyeth paintings from other museums and rarely-seen works from private collections because of the fragile nature of watercolor and tempera.
“In Retrospect” not only chronologically frames Wyeth’s prolific output, but also introduces you to the people that were closest to him. There are portraits of his wife, Betsy; his son, Nicholas; Chadds Ford German-American farm couple Karl and Anna Kuerner; Maine neighbor Christina Olson (of “Christina’s World” fame); James Loper and other members of a Chadds Ford African-American community centered around the “Mother Archie’s Church;” Siri Erickson (including one of the nudes); and Karl Kuerner’s nurse, Helga Testorf (three of the Helga nudes are part of the exhibition).
Brandywine River Museum of Art curator Audrey Lewis, co-curator of “Andrew Wyeth: In Retrospect,” said that starting in the 1950s, “he’s trying to understand the people of the land of the United States. The farm was such an important part of his being.”
Of Wyeth’s closely-guarded nude portraits – the Siri paintings weren’t shown in public until 1973, after she turned 19, and the Helga pictures were kept secret until 1985 – Lewis said: “It was scandalous, but the public came (to see them) in droves.” In one way, they were a response to the modernist-minded critics of the 1960s that wrote Wyeth off as sentimental.
In 1989 Wyeth painted the large tempera “Snow Hill,” which depicts the Kuerners, Loper, Testorf, and Allan Lynch from Wyeth signature work “Winter 1946” dancing in a circle around a pole in a snowy scene atop Kuerner’s Hill. The artist once joked: “When I worked I raised hell with them, mentally and emotionally. They wish I were dead, so they wouldn’t have to pose anymore.”
And in case you think you have Wyeth’s approach to landscapes figured out – whether local farmland scenes or mid-coastal Maine – you’ll be surprised by works like “Tarpapering” and “April Wind,” both completed in 1952. “We think of Wyeth as having an earthy [palette], but … here we see some color,” Lewis said.
Adding depth to the exhibition is a selection of Wyeth’s studies, which were rarely exhibited in the artist’s lifetime, and offer insights into his creative process and approach.
The Brandywine River Museum is the only East Coast venue for the exhibit, and the only location where visitors can immerse themselves in the world of Wyeth through tours of his studio and the Kuerner Farm.