AMBER WAVES OF GRAIN: I had my first bout of premorse since TPE coined that phrase, when I found out Andrew Wyeth died today and not two decades ago. Wyeth was one of those painters who you could use as a pretty useful gauge of another person's attitude toward painting. A lot of people (we'll call them modernists and postmodernists as a particularly blunt shorthand) thought he was an anachronism and hated what he did and how he did it. Others, we'll call them Rockwellians, either loved what he did and hated how he did it or hated what he did and loved how he did it, depending upon how you define your terms. And then some people just loved Wyeth.
Wiki says that the knock on Wyeth is that he was representational, not abstract, but, as usual, that's not quite right. Any number of non-abstract painters doing or incorporating figurative work have served as darlings of the contemporary art commentariat. I think that the knock on Wyeth has been more that he adopted a kind of bucolic small-"r" realism that seemed, to some, unchallenging. Wyeth's work is kind of like Rockwell without the optimism. That's a pretty narrow path to walk, and it's not for everybody (for the most part, not for me, though given the Yankee Stadium thread I doubt I'll be picking up any passengers on the anti-anachronism train here), but there's no doubt that Wyeth walked it well.
Incidentally, Wyeth's best-known work was his Christina's World, an image that Robert Zemeckis used cleverly in Forrest Gump, when Jenny sees her childhood home and breaks down. Christina's World is one of those rare images, like Guernica or the Endless Summer poster, that can supply an instant set of associations and emotions upon recognition.
The articles say that Wyeth is survived by his wife Betsy, but they weirdly don't mention what ever happened to Helga.
ETA: Okay, this is funny, though it may cause Eagles fans to wince a little.
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