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Andrew Wyeth
Published: 1/16/2009 1:09 PM
Last Modified: 1/16/2009 1:09 PM

Andrew Wyeth has died, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Read the story: Andrew Wyeth Dies

Wyeth was one of America's most popular artists – his painting "Christina's World" is one of the icons of 20th century American art – which in one sense is a little surprising, as he work was so intensely personal, so particular.

Some artists are able to – even need to – apply their talents to broad range of subjects and forms. There are writers, for example, who compose poetry, pen novels, turn out screenplays, all of which move through genres and styles, and do all of these things quite well. There are painters who start out doing portraits, move on to pure abstraction, take up sculpting, create collages, make prints, and on and on.

Then there are those artists who focus on a relatively narrow subject matter, who try to explore and exploit every possible nuance of whatever it is that has captured their attention. Wyeth was one of those artists, who trained his seemingly dispassionate eye on the bleak and rugged landscapes of Chadds Ford, Penn., and rural Maine, and a few families there.

I've never understood the way so many critics dismiss Wyeth and his work. "Sentimental" was for many years the most popular epithet to place on Wyeth's paintings; after all, they depicted real settings and people in great detail, an almost heretical thing at a time when abstraction and social comment were the driving forces of the art world.

Maybe the reason for the critical disdain was the fact that Wyeth's paintings grew out of, and were designed to evoke, emotions that people really did not want to confront – feelings of loneliness and isolation, the dread of age and mortality, the importance of the tiny marks human beings make on the surface of land that changes only its façade with the seasons.

Nothing "trendy" in any of that, and nothing "sentimental," either. In Wyeth's best work, you get the odd sensation of time at once standing still and inexorably grinding on – that what we are seeing when we look at a Wyeth painting is not simply an image, but a moment out of time, a fragment of memory, a glimpse out of the corner of the eye that seems to hold, and to be more real, than life itself.

In other words, art.



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ARTS

James D. Watts Jr. has lived in Oklahoma for most his life, even though he still has people saying to him, "Don't sound like you're from around these parts." A University of Oklahoma Phi Beta Kappa graduate, Watts has received the Governor Arts Award, Harwelden Award and the National Conference of Christians and Jews Beth Macklin Award for his writing. Before coming to the Tulsa World, Watts worked for the Tulsa Tribune.

Contact him at (918) 581-8478.

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