The paintings of Andrew Wyeth have
been etched in the American national consciousness for more than a half
a century. While many of Wyeth’s landscapes and interior views of rural
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The 2007 National Medal of Arts was
awarded to painter Andrew Wyeth and presented by President Bush on November
15, 2007 in an East Room ceremony.
Mr. Wyeth received the award for “a
lifetime of paintings whose meticulous realism have captured the American
consciousness, and whose austere vision has displayed the depth and dignity
of rural American life.”
The National Medal of Arts is a presidential
initiative managed by the National Endowment for the Arts. Photo by
Michael Stewart for the National Endowment for the Arts |
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Pennsylvania and Maine are recognizable
settings, his work portrays an inner life that is elusive and enigmatic.
The youngest of five children, Andrew
Newell Wyeth was born on July 12, 1917 in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania in
the Brandywine Valley near Philadelphia. He was educated at home with his
father, noted illustrator N.C. Wyeth, providing art lessons. When he was
only 20 years old, he had his first solo exhibition at Macbeth Gallery
in New York City. The rapid and complete sale of the exhibition inventory
was an indication of his enormous popularity with the American public in
the years to come.
In 1939, Wyeth met Betsy James whose
family had a summer place not far from the Wyeths in Cushing, Maine. She
was 17 years old, Wyeth was 20, and after a week he proposed. They were
married the following spring and have remained married for 68 years. Over
those years, Betsy has been her husband’s protector as well as artistic
guide.
In October 1945, Wyeth’s father and
his three-year old nephew Newell were killed in a car accident. He has
referred to this tragedy as not only of deep personal impact but also formative
in the development of his artistic style. Shortly after the accident, his
paintings became more serious and intense, characterized by a muted palette,
highly realistic depictions, and emotionally charged subjects, often tinged
with a sense of nostalgia and loss. He found nearly all of his subjects
close to either Chadds Ford or Cushing.
In 1950, he was selected along with
Jackson Pollock by Time magazine as one of the greatest American
artists. That and other public attentions, made clear the battle lines
drawn between supporters and practitioners of realism and abstraction as
represented by Wyeth and Pollock. To add to the art world debates, in 1986,
Wyeth made public a collection of 246 studies, drawings, and paintings,
including many nudes, he had made of Helga Testorf, a neighbor in Chadds
Ford.
Wyeth remains an enormously popular
artist among the public and by museums. His work is in the collections
of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art,
and the Museum of Modern Art, among many others. Exhibitions of his work
have been mounted by the National Gallery of Art (the first to display
the Helga works in 1987), the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston,) Metropolitan
Museum of Art, and most recently the Philadelphia Museum of Art, amongst
many others.
In 1963, Andrew Wyeth became the first
painter to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which was conferred
by President John F. Kennedy. In 1977, he became the first American artist
since John Singer Sargent elected to the Académie des Beaux-Arts.
In 1978, he was asked to join the Soviet Academy of the Arts, and in 1980,
he was the first living U.S. artist to be elected to Britain's Royal Academy.
Wyeth received the Congressional Gold Medal in 1988, the highest civilian
honor bestowed by the United States Congress. |