The passing of a truly American icon.
Andrew Wyeth, best-loved painter of wistfulness, rural bleakness,menace, Puritanical solitude and an America lost to 20th-century dryrot, died yesterday morning in his sleep at the Wyeth family estate inChadds Ford, Pa., between Philadelphia and Wilmington, Del. He was 91.He died in just the sort of weather he loved, the empty cold and thesharp sunlight of the dead of winter.
“America’s best-known and best-loved artist,” said a catalogue for a1996 show at the Baltimore Museum of Art, before it elevated him stillhigher: “America’s artist.”
At a White House dinner in 1970, Richard Nixon toasted Wyeth as anartist who “caught the heart of America.” Critic Jay Jacobs once calledhim “the spiritual leader of Middle America.”
As such, he took a beating from critics who attacked him as morbid,mawkish and a “Martha Stewart existentialist.” He made it easy for themwith his morbid coyness, and his attempts to claim credentials as thesort of abstractionist they admired.
Coy: as in a painting called “Brown Swiss,” which showed an off-whitefarmhouse reflected in a pond and surrounded by brown pasture with nocows in it whatsoever. He liked to say that his most famous painting,“Christina’s World,” might have been better without Christina in it, acrippled, withered woman in a pink housedress dragging herself up aparched hill toward a weather-beaten Maine farmhouse. It wouldn’t have.
