It also places his work in conversation with other artists’ self-portraiture and reflections on mortality. The exhibition connects the sketches now known as the Funeral Group to Wyeth’s decades-long engagement with death as an artistic subject in painting, his relationships with the models depicted, and his expressive and exploratory use of drawing. Some of the drawings offer a view inside the coffin, revealing a rare self-portrait.
The artworks, made in the early 1990s, portray Wyeth’s friends, neighbors, and wife, Betsy, surrounding a coffin at the base of Kuerner’s Hill in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, a site the artist long associated with death, including that of his father. Many critics have long accused Wyeth of sentimentalism, while others argue that his pieces instead portray subtle drama, intensity, and a strong emotional component lurking beneath the surface.This exhibition is the first public presentation of recently rediscovered drawings in which artist Andrew Wyeth (1917–2009) imagines his own funeral.
Rather than focusing on urban life and abstract themes, Wyeth’s works centered rural narratives of life in Maine, Pennsylvania, and New England. Despite her disability, Christina preferred to crawl through the farm without mobility aids like a cane or wheelchair, inspiring Wyeth to paint “Christina’s World” from her vantage point in the field.Īndrew Wyeth was a popular but controversial realist who stood in stark contrast to modernism, pop art, and other experimental artistic movements of the 20th century. Alvaro, once a fisherman, became a farmer so he could stay closer to his sister and help her around the home. Christina suffered from a disability that resulted in the loss of the use of her legs. Christina and Alvaro inherited the Olson House, originally built in the late 18th century by Captain Samuel Hawthorn II, in 1929.
0 kommentar(er)
