Andrew Wyeth's Legacy

[Serioza]

.....Long after it was no longer fashionable or even permissible to practice a flinty, granular realism, Wyeth went on making pictures with the kind of brushwork that specified the world in almost molecular detail .....What people mean when they accuse Wyeth of sentimentality is not that he gets cute, but that the world we see in his paintings seems like a place we might long to inhabit sometimes but don't actually live in.....

Article by Richard Lacayo Saturday, Jan. 17, 2009 Time magazine

......He was good at giving self-aggrandizing interviews and had a gift for self-promotion that came to a head with the curious case of the Helga pictures. Those were a cache of 240 paintings, watercolors and drawings, some of them nudes, that Wyeth had made between 1970 and 1985 of a typically subdued, slightly Rubenesque young blonde woman. In the summer of 1986, the New York Times reported on its front page that an American collector named Leonard Anderson had paid $6 million for these previously "unknown" works......Soon it emerged that the woman was Helga Testorf, a married housekeeper for Wyeth's sister Carolyn in Chadds Ford. Wyeth's wife Betsy claimed to have known nothing about the pictures....After the publicity storm had been whipped to a peak, he sold the whole bunch to a Japanese buyer for a reported $45 million.....

Article by Cathy Booth Monday, Aug.18,1986 Time magazine

[Larry Kart]

"....Long after it was no longer fashionable or even permissible to practice a flinty, granular realism, Wyeth went on making pictures with the kind of brushwork that specified the world in almost molecular detail ....."

Oh, really? See the immensely fashionable (for a good stretch of time now, in some quarters) work of John Currin (some of these images may be offensive):

http://images.google.com/images?source=ig&...=1&ct=title

[Alexander]

I don't know if the article mentions this, but Charles Schulz was a fan. Snoopy famously had a Wyeth hanging in his doghouse!

[BruceH]

I don't know if the article mentions this, but Charles Schulz was a fan. Snoopy famously had a Wyeth hanging in his doghouse!

I must admit I immediately thought of that, but didn't want to mention it.

[connoisseur series500]

That was a great article on Wyeth. I've seen a few of his pictures in museums and have always liked his work. I'm also a fan of NC Wyeth, his father. I do see some technical similarities between the two.