January 17, 2009
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Andrew Wyeth
Andrew Wyeth, arguably America’s most famous, most popular and most critically panned living artist, died in his sleep early Friday morning at his home outside Philadelphia. He was 91.
My dad painted a bit like Wyeth that is why I feel a bit sad about his passing.Wyeth, the master of “magic-realist” painting, had been famous from his youth, portraying mostly the people and places he knew best in Pennsylvania’s Brandywine Valley and coastal Maine. Most notable was Christina’s World (1948), “one of the four or five indelible American paintings, hugely famous,” according to Wyeth biographer Richard Meryman, author of the admiring Andrew Wyeth: A Secret Life, who knew the artist and his indispensable wife Betsy from an interview in 1963.
Then Wyeth’s renown turned to notoriety with the Helga pictures, 246 sketches, drawings, studies and paintings featuring one of his neighbors. The collection made headlines and magazine covers around the world when the artist suddenly decided to reveal its existence in 1986 after keeping the works hidden for years.“One of the very exciting things for him (was) secrecy — everything is in secret, not just the Helga paintings,” says Meryman.
