American Realist Painter Andrew Wyeth Dies at 91

Published: January 16, 2009

Courtesy the Museum of Modern Art

Andrew Wyeth, "Christina's World' (1948)

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PHILADELPHIA—Andrew Wyeth, the immensely popular American realist painter whose art split critical opinion down the middle, has died at the age of 91. He died in his sleep at his home in the Philadelphia suburb of Chadds Ford, Bloomberg reports.

Wyeth was among America's most celebrated living artists. His haunting, sparse realist depictions of the people and landscapes of Pennsylvania and Maine — the two places where he split his time — have been the subject of museum exhibitions from Paris to Tokyo and all around the U.S. Critics were divided over his art, with some lauding it as powerful modernist depictions of loneliness, death, and decay and others dismissing it as popular illustration.

Born in Chadds Ford in 1917, Wyeth had his first solo show at the William Macbeth Gallery in New York in 1937. Eschewing the Abstract Expressionism of his contemporaries, he created his most famous piece, Christina's World — which depicts his Maine neighbor, who was unable to walk, stretching out in a blueberry field and looking up longingly at a house and a barn — in 1948. The picture was purchased by the Museum of Modern Art in New York the same year.

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President John F. Kennedy awarded Wyeth the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1963, and in 1970, President Richard Nixon honored the artist with a private dinner and exhibition at the White House. The Metropolitan Museum of Art mounted "Two Worlds of Andrew Wyeth: Kuerners and Olsons" in 1976–77; it was the museum's first show devoted to a living artist.

Wyeth's "Helga Pictures," a series of 240 intimate portraits of his Chadds Ford neighbor Helga Testorf, made headlines when they became public (they were bought by businessman Leonard Andrews) in 1986.

Most recently, President George W. Bush awarded Wyeth the National Medal of Arts for "a lifetime of paintings whose meticulous realism have captured the American consciousness."

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