PHILADELPHIA — Artist Andrew Wyeth, who portrayed the hidden melancholy of the people and landscapes of Pennsylvania’s Brandywine Valley and coastal Maine in works such as “Christina’s World,” died early Friday. He was 91.
Wyeth died in his sleep at his home in the Philadelphia suburb of Chadds Ford, according to Jim Duff, director of the Brandywine River Museum.
The son of famed painter and book illustrator N.C. Wyeth, Andrew Wyeth gained wealth, acclaim and tremendous popularity on his own. But he chafed under criticism from some experts who regarded him as a facile realist, not an artist but merely an illustrator.
“He was a man of extraordinary perception, and that perception was found in his thousands of images — many, many of them iconic,” Duff said Friday in an interview. “He highly valued the natural world, the historical objects of this world as they exist in the present and strong-willed people.”
A Wyeth retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2006 drew more than 175,000 visitors in 15 1/2 weeks, the highest attendance at the museum for a living artist. The Brandywine River Museum in Chadds Ford, a converted 19th-century grist mill, includes hundreds of works by three generations of Wyeths.
Wyeth even made it into the comic strip “Peanuts,” in November 1966: After a fire in his doghouse destroys his van Gogh, Snoopy replaces it with an Andrew Wyeth.
It was in Maine that Wyeth found the subject for “Christina’s World,” his best-known painting. And it was in Pennsylvania that he met Helga Testorf, a neighbor in his native Chadds Ford who became the subject of the intimate portraits that brought him millions of dollars and a wave of public attention in 1986.
The “Helga” paintings, many of them full-figure nudes, came with a whiff of scandal: Wyeth said he had not even told his wife, Betsy, about the more than 200 paintings and sketches until he had completed them in 1985.
“Really, I think one’s art goes only as far and as deep as your love goes,” Wyeth said in a Life magazine interview in 1965.
“I don’t paint these hills around Chadds Ford because they’re better than the hills somewhere else. It’s that I was born here, lived here — things have a meaning for me.”
Wyeth was a secretive man who spent hours tramping the countryside alone. Much of Wyeth’s work had a melancholy feel — aging people and brown, dead plants — but he chose to describe his work as “thoughtful.”
“I do an awful lot of thinking and dreaming about things in the past and the future — the timelessness of the rocks and the hills — all the people who have existed there,” he once said. “I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure in the landscape — the loneliness of it — the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it; the whole story doesn’t show.
“I think anything like that — which is contemplative, silent, shows a person alone — people always feel is sad. Is it because we’ve lost the art of being alone?”
Wyeth remained active in recent years and President Bush presented him with a National Medal of the Arts in 2007. But his granddaughter, Victoria Wyeth, told The Associated Press in 2008 that he no longer gave interviews. “He says, ‘Vic, everything I have to say is on the walls,’ ” she said.
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