Currently on view at the Brandywine Museum of Art is Andrew Wyeth: Home Places, featuring nearly 50 paintings and drawings of local buildings that inspired Wyeth over seven decades of his career. Drawn from the nearly 7,000-object Andrew and Betsy Wyeth Collection of the Wyeth Foundation for American Art, many of these pieces have never before been exhibited, offering a first glimpse at a significant treasure trove that will shed new light on the collaborative creative process of Andrew and Betsy Wyeth.
Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009), The Miller’s Son, 1934. Oil on canvas. Collection of the Wyeth Foundation for American Art © Wyeth Foundation for American Art/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.
Andrew Wyeth repeatedly depicted a small group of historic houses in the immediate vicinity of his hometown of Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. While others might have overlooked these weathered buildings that stood in defiance of the area’s commercial development, Wyeth found them an endless source of inspiration for an exploration and development of his craft. Wyeth himself put it best: “You can be in a place for years and years and not see something, and then when it dawns, all sorts of nuggets of richness start popping all over the place. You’ve gotten below the obvious.”
Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009), Noah’s Ark Study, 2004. Watercolor on paper. Collection of the Wyeth Foundation for American Art B4033 © Andrew Wyeth/Artists Rights Society (ARS).
This is the first exhibition at the Brandywine curated by William L. Coleman, the museum’s inaugural Wyeth Foundation curator and director. He says, “I’m incredibly fortunate to oversee and include everything from some of the artist’s best loved works in the medium of egg tempera like Night Sleeper and Pentecost—superlative examples of his virtuosic watercolor practice and the drybrush technique that became a particular trademark, through the intimate and powerful preliminary drawings.”
Coleman selected works from all of the forementioned media for the exhibit to showcase the little-understood “house portraiture” that Wyeth practiced steadfastly throughout the course of this creative career. “Through this selection of artworks, we understand an artist deeply rooted in place who found in the humble old buildings in a roughly two-square-mile area all the inspiration, emotion and associations a full career would require,” says Coleman.
Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009), 747, 1980. Tempera on panel. Collection of the Wyeth Foundation for American Art © Andrew Wyeth/Artists Rights Society (ARS).
Many of these never-before-exhibited works sat in obscurity because Wyeth was such a prolific artist, and because his earliest works and studies were not deemed worthy for museum display until his significance was fully realized in the later years of his life.
To provide a sense of the breadth of the exhibit, it includes both an oil on canvas created by a 17-year-old Wyeth and a watercolor painted when he was 87. Both depict Brighton Mill, the property that eventually became his own. Neither The Miller’s Son nor Noah’s Ark Study have been previously exhibited.
Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009), Swifts – First Version, 1991. Watercolor on paper. Collection of the Wyeth Foundation for American Art B3200r © Andrew Wyeth/Artists Rights Society (ARS).
“Wyeth’s gaze was not just backwards-looking: he was a modern artist who found in these structures abstract geometries that captured his imagination,” says Coleman. “He was also fascinated by the unexpected proximity of evocative old buildings to modern transportation infrastructure. The slippage of past and present in the subjects on view, and the wide range of abstract and realist methods he employed in depicting them, reveal an American original who offers through his work an alternate narrative of 20th-century art that is much more interesting and complicated than the one long taught.”
Home Places remains on view at the Brandywine Museum through July 13.
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