American painter Andrew Wyeth dies at 91
Artist gained fame for his ‘Christina’s World’ collection, Helga portraits
Andrew Wyeth / AP
“Christina’s World” by Andrew Wyeth is the artist’s best-known painting.
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.
Wyeth was a secretive man who spent hours tramping the countryside alone. He painted many portraits, working several times with favorite subjects, but said he disliked having someone else watching him paint.
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?”