Public Display of Affection

On Saturday, January 24th, the Brandywine River Museum and the Wyeth family celebrated with the public the life and art of Andrew Wyeth. (The memorial card distributed to visitors with thanks from the Wyeth family appears above.) Free admission and the first ever showing of Christina's World in Wyeth’s Chadds Ford were only two of the drawing cards. The biggest draw, however, remained the chance to join together and remember a man of the community. It’s so rare today that an artist becomes so closely identified with a region that Wyeth may be the last major American artist who could garner such an outpouring of affection. It was truly awesome to see. Annie, Alex, and I drove down expecting a crowd, but nothing like the long line of cars waiting just to get into the packed parking lots of the museum. We met friends Michele and Dave at the museum and got in line to walk through the Andrew Wyeth galleries, which snaked down from the third floor to the second.

As we wound our way closer to the gallery, we watched people write in the many memorial books. “Profile of Andrew Wyeth,” an organ piece written by Andy’s sister Ann, rumbled over the loudspeakers, giving the procession a momentary funereal feel. The spirit of fun that was Andy Wyeth, however, eventually took over and people began to recall stories and search the crowds for famous faces from the paintings. The Brandywine River rolled past below, carrying sheets of melting ice past. The broad windows of the Brandywine River Museum gave a great opportunity to wonder at the land that inspired Andy his entire 91 years in this world. It was as if nature itself staged a snowfall and melt just to pay tribute, too.

Just before reaching the steps to the third floor, we could see into the space for the Unique Force exhibition of Carolyn Wyeth’s art. (The entrance appears above.) Sadly, once again, Carolyn seems doomed to be overshadowed by her younger brother. I didn’t have time to look for more than a few minutes through that exhibition, but that was enough to want to come back and give her more attention. The line then worked its way through the N.C. Wyeth galleries, reminding us of how Andy got his start in art as well as just how different a path he took from his father’s. It was fascinating to see the portrait of the 12-year-old Andy sitting in the corner of N.C.’s In a Dream I Met George Washington. (Go here and enlarge the image to see the young, blond Andy.) Later on, I saw a portrait by Andy’s older sister Henriette Wyeth Hurd of the 21-year-old Andy standing proudly beside one of the startlingly colorful watercolors with which he made his first splash in the art world in 1938. It occurred to me that the Brandywine River Museum could easily work with the Wyeth family to assemble a series of portraits of Andy that would span most of his nine decades of life. That would truly be something to see.

Right before entering the Andrew Wyeth galleries, we saw displays of the many medals and honorary degrees Wyeth received over the years (above). Andy would certainly have hated such a display, but it was just a glimpse of the long-standing impact he had on American art and culture reaching all the way back to the 1940s. Once inside the gallery, we, of course, looked at Christina’s World, but the many other familiar works called to us one by one, stirring up all the old stories to be repeated once more. But it was one unfamiliar work that drew the most attention—Wyeth’s final painting, titled presciently Goodbye. A large tempera, Goodbye shows a white house, most likely in Maine, reflected in water running alongside. A small boat slips quietly out of the picture frame on the left. The technique is, of course, amazing. The subject matter and title, however, simply knocked you off your feet. It was as if Andy said goodbye to each one of us personally, rewarding us for taking the time to look and understand when so many others had failed to, especially in these final years.

Just before we entered the Andrew Wyeth gallery, we spotted Jamie Wyeth (above) and his wife, Phyllis, enter the gallery through a special entrance. They stopped first to look at the display of medals and degrees, as if they had never seen them all in one place before either, before disappearing into the private offices of the museum. For a family as fiercely private as the Wyeths, Saturday’s special celebration must have been a difficult decision, but one I’m sure they do not regret. For all the critics who dismiss Andrew Wyeth’s art out of prejudice, ignorance, or a combination of the two, you cannot deny the power of the people to vote with their feet and elect Andy as one of the greatest painters America has ever produced. I thank the Wyeth family and the Brandywine River Museum for allowing those of us who could attend the chance to express our affection publicly and pay our heartfelt respects.

[Many thanks to Dave for sharing his photos of the medal display case and Jamie Wyeth that appear above.]

[BONUS CELEBRITY SIGHTING: While waiting in line, Annie and Alex walked over to a bench for a rest. Alex sat beside a young boy about his age. That young boy’s mother asked Alex for his name, to which Alex characteristically responded with his full name, including his middle name “Robert.” “That’s Luke’s middle name, too—Luke Robert Watson,” she responded. Annie talked with the other mother, not realizing, as Michele, Dave, and I did, that it was local TV news personality Cecily Tynan. When Annie and Alex rejoined us, we told Annie who she was speaking with, to her amusement. If you’re out there reading, Cecily, I hope you and Luke enjoyed the show, too.]

The Long Goodbye

“Wyeth died.” I was at work talking to Annie on the phone when I saw that two-word e-mail come from a friend. Andrew Wyeth (above) passed away early this morning peacefully in his sleep at the age of 91. I told Annie instantly, still stunned. Andy Wyeth seemed like someone who could go on forever. A world without Wyeth seemed inconceivable. Yet, he is gone. I imagine him somewhere in the afterworld, sitting with N.C. and talking shop. And laughing that great, deep down in his bones laugh. Even at 91, there was something eternally young and almost elfin about Andy and that came through in his art. Elves can be mischievous, too, as Wyeth demonstrated throughout his life. “I’m not a nice man,” Wyeth once said. Instead, Wyeth was quintessentially human in his art, plumbing the depths of both the good and bad in human nature, from the warmth of his scenes of African-Americans living their simple lives to the chilling cruelty in Karl Kuerner, Sr.’s ice-blue eyes.

The Brandywine Museum already has a memorial page set up, including an Andrew Wyeth Blog at which you can pay your virtual respects. It will be interesting to see how the Brandywine evolves after Andy’s death. Andy blocked many attempts to study his long career, which stretched back all the way to the 1930s. (Wyeth’s 1938 Self-Portrait appears above.) Will the Brandywine become finally The Andrew Wyeth Museum? Andy was certainly prolific enough to provide enough material to assemble new exhibitions for a long, long time. The Brandywine has long been known as the museum of the Brandywine School, but the other artists of that description have long taken a back seat to Andy, including his father. Much of the Wyeth oeuvre has languished in storage, unseen by the public. Often, new paintings would appear in the Andrew Wyeth gallery of the Brandywine with little or no fanfare and disappear just as mysteriously. Hopefully, the fears that overexposure would hinder Andy’s work have died with him. Now is the time for us to see Wyeth whole.

I regret never having the chance to meet Andy. I came relatively close when hoping to do a piece or perhaps even a book on his sister Carolyn, whose upcoming exhibition at the Brandywine may now be overshadowed by Andy’s death. Age, illness, shyness, and just a plain weariness over covering well-trodden ground kept Wyeth from doing many interviews over his last years. The full portrait of Wyeth remains to be written. In 1981, Wyeth painted Dr. Syn (above), a “self-portrait” based on x-rays of himself. Wyeth was never so self-revealing in life, even though his paintings always came from some piece of his life. Wyeth’s art was almost always the cycling and recycling of memories—both his own and those of the landscape around him. Now that he is gone, we will discover how many of those memories were taken with him and how many were recorded for us to study and learn from. I believe that today is not the last day of Andrew Wyeth’s life but rather the first day that the world truly begins to appreciate and look to understand this remarkable man and his unforgettable art.

Ladies Night

Henriette Wyeth, Gardenias, c. 1935-1945. Oil on canvas, 18 x 24 inches.

Anyone familiar with the history of the Brandywine School of art knows the well-worn litany of men who shaped that tradition: from the founder, Howard Pyle; to Pyle’s student, N. C. Wyeth; to N.C.’s son, Andrew; and to Andrew’s son, Jamie. Behind that great wall of descent, however, lurks the great ladies of the Brandywine tradition: from Pyle’s student, Jessie Willcox Smith, to N.C.’s three talented daughters— Henriette, Carolyn, and Ann. Wyeth Women—An Exhibition of Paintings by The Daughters of N.C. Wyeth at the Somerville Manning Gallery brings these talented women out of the shadows of the men of the Brandywine legacy and will hopefully allows such works as Henriette’s Gardenias (above) to find their place in the pantheon beside their father, brother, and nephew.

As the catalogue to the exhibition points out, Henriette was truly the “prodigy” of the family, the talented child upon whom N.C. placed his highest hopes. When young, rough-and-ready artist Peter Hurd descended upon Chadds Ford to learn from N.C., Henriette found a partner in both life and art. After their marriage, they moved back to Peter’s native New Mexico. Perhaps because of that distance, the subject matter of Henriette’s work goes in a different direction from that of her brother Andrew, which is so inextricably rooted to Chadds Ford. Henriette gained much success in painting portraits of actress Helen Hayes, Mrs. John D. Rockerfeller III, and First Lady Pat Nixon, but it was in her still lifes, such as Gardenias, that she found a gentler subject. Henriette’s ability to depict the shimmering textures of seashells and the almost nothingness of feathers demonstrates not only her skill but the vast departure she made from the world of her father and the sturdy action figures of his illustration work.

Ann Wyeth McCoy, Yellow Flowers in Vase, 2003. Watercolor, 20 x 14 inches.

N.C.’s youngest daughter, Ann, showed early promise as both a composer and an artist. A musical composition she wrote for her father sadly became his requiem when he died in 1945. Like Henriette, Ann married one of her father’s students, John McCoy, himself an outstanding watercolorist and an artistic confidant to Andrew. Thanks to her husband and brother, Ann continued to learn the medium of watercolor and created works such as Yellow Flowers in Vase (above). Like Andrew, Ann painted scenes of the world around her in Chadds Ford. Unlike Andrew, however, Ann’s inspiration came more from the domestic than the rural. The tradition of Wyeth women continues today through Ann’s daughter, Anna B., who studied for some time with N.C.’s second daughter, Carolyn.

Carolyn Wyeth, The Jones House, c. 1937. Oil on canvas, 26 x 31 1/2 inches.

To me, Carolyn is the most fascinating of the Wyeth women. Her paintings show a restless, almost nervous energy, as in The Jones House (above). The unpopulated nature of almost all of her works (even in The Jones House, which was a gift to friends) suggests both a rejection of the world at large and loneliness. After N.C.’s death, Carolyn lived in her father’s house and taught there. “If she liked you, she loved you. But if she didn’t, watch out,” Karl J. Kuerner III, one of Carolyn’s students remembers. Jamie, Anna B., and a host of other artists went through Carolyn’s school, many of whom later went on to teach themselves, spreading her influence even further. In many ways, Carolyn continued the teaching tradition begun by Pyle by opening her school right there in Chadds Ford. With the centennial of Carolyn’s birth coming up next year, a catalogue of her works is being compiled. I myself am interested in pursuing her story, not as the gruff eccentric but as the serious artist and teacher of art. Andrew called his sister Carolyn the best critic of his art, even sharing the secret of the Helga paintings with her and her alone during their creation. Unfortunately, Carolyn sought the shadows for the greater part of her life. Perhaps this exhibition and further scholarship on her can coax her into the spotlight she so richly deserves.

The bond between the children of N.C. Wyeth transcended place and time. Each stemming from that common root of imagination flowered in their own way. To look at Henriette’s painting is to see hints of Andrew filtered through N.C. and Peter Hurd. To look at Ann’s art is to see the domestic bliss and powerful sense of place fostered by the nurturing education environment of her father. To look at Carolyn’s work is to see pure, rough-hewn honesty of her father, and to understand why Andrew valued her imput after their father’s death in developing his own vision. Those connections don't diminish these women but, rather, should enhance just how strong their works are next to the more recognized works of the Wyeth men. Wyeth Women—An Exhibition of Paintings by The Daughters of N.C. Wyeth brings the larger picture of the Brandywine School into sharper focus and hints at the still-to-be-written chapters of the Wyeth dynasty’s story.

[Many thanks to Somerville Manning Gallery for providing me with a copy of the catalogue to Wyeth Women—An Exhibition of Paintings by The Daughters of N.C. Wyeth and for the images from the exhibition.]

Passing the Torch

Karl Kuerner, Percheron in Chadds Ford, 1995. Acrylic on Panel 19 3/4 x 41 ¾. Collection of Louise and Karl Kuerner.

“It’s up to you to carry this on,” Andrew Wyeth says to Karl J. Kuerner in Gene Logsdon’s recent study, The Mother of All Arts: Agrarianism and the Creative Impulse. “And it won’t be easy.” The burden and blessing of the tradition of the Brandywine School, founded by Howard Pyle and carried forward by N.C., Andrew, and Jamie Wyeth, now rests upon the shoulders of Karl J. Kuerner, grandson of the Karl Kuerner made famous in Andrew’s portraits. Kuerner’s own paintings now take the stage in the first survey of his art, All in a Day’s Work… from Heritage to Artist. With works such as Percheron in Chadds Ford (above), Kuerner embraces his artistic and family heritages simultaneously, remaining true to the twin sets of ideals intertwined throughout his life. “At the age of 50, Karl J. Kuerner is a true artist ready to show his talent to the world at large,” writes Andrew Wyeth in his introduction to All in a Day’s Work, starting the coming out party with a bang.



Karl Kuerner, In the Blink of an Eye, 1999. Watercolor 22 3/4 x 36 ¼. Collection of Samuel DiMatteo.

Kuerner claims that his earliest memories of the family farm are of watching Andrew Wyeth painting their bull. The influence of his grandparents on Kuerner remains as strong as that of Wyeth. “It was their acceptance of, almost reverence for, hard work that is often in his mind as he paints,” writes Gene Logsdon in the text accompanying the paintings in All in a Day’s Work. Anna Kuerner, Karl’s grandmother and also featured in many masterpieces by Andrew Wyeth, swept the porch regularly until her death at 98, an image Kuerner captures in his Anna’s Morning. Kuerner depicts her lingering (some would say spectral) presence on the farm and in his life in a later work, In the Blink of an Eye (above). “Sometimes I swear that I can still see her for a fleeting moment out of the corner of my eye,” Karl confesses. This tenderness shows the other side of the often brusque, brutal life of the farm that his grandfather embodied in Andrew’s art.


Karl Kuerner, Out of Nowhere, 2004. Oil on canvas, 60 x 48. Collection of Louise and Karl Kuerner.

Fate linked the lives of the Kuerners and Wyeths forever on October 19, 1945—the day N.C. Wyeth and his grandson died in a tragic car accident on train tracks running through the Kuerner farm. N.C.’s ghost haunts the Brandywine School even today, the crux upon which so many questions were decided. In Out of Nowhere (above), Karl pays homage to that sad beginning to so many years of Andrew’s genius. If N.C. had not died at that time, would Andrew have become the same kind of artist? Consequently, would Karl have become an artist at all? The role that Karl’s grandfather played as a surrogate father figure to Andrew brought Andrew closer to the Kuerner family and farm, providing him with one of the richest sources of his inspiration and opening the door for young Karl to enter an artist’s life himself.

Karl Kuerner, Miss Wyeth, 1981. Acrylic on illustration board, 30 x 40. Collection of Brandywine River Museum, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Andrew Wyeth, 1985.

Karl owes his success today not only to Andrew but also to Andrew’s sister, Carolyn, who taught Karl the foundations of painting. “I was just thirteen,” Karl recalls. “My father took some of my drawings to her and she offered to tutor me, which she did for seven years. I am forever grateful to her.” Karl’s painting Miss Wyeth (above) honors Carolyn’s memory and now stands shoulder to shoulder with other works of the Brandywine School at the Brandywine River Museum in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. Rather than painting a conventional portrait, Kuerner chooses to show Carolyn from a distance, standing outside in the falling snow, capturing at a remove and through a natural setting the solitary, sometimes gruff, yet essentially gentle, almost romantic nature of his teacher, a sadly forgotten figure in the Brandywine tradition.

Karl Kuerner, Charades, 2003. Acrylic on panel, 28 x 48. Collection of Louise and Karl Kuerner.

Whether Kuerner’s love of Halloween and the macabre comes from his contact with the Wyeths, from his family heritage, or both is unclear, but it comes through in many of his paintings, including Charades (above). “To chase away the temptation to gloom that comes with the dying down of the year, and also to take advantage of the leisure time that follows the end of the harvest, rural people turn to sport, to antic fun,” Logsdon explains in the Kuerner book. “Halloween. Witches and goblins. Pranksters.” Halloween pumpkins and pranks fill many of Andrew and Jamie Wyeth's works, evidence of their famously madcap sense of humor. Kuerner’s love of puns in his titles exceeds even that of the Wyeths in its playfulness. He also sometimes extends his Halloween-loving side past that of the Wyeths to the borders of the Surreal in works such as Charades and Storyteller, two theatrical visions featuring fog-covered foregrounds that prominently feature masks and address issues of identity in the context of art and telling tales.

Kuerner saves his native environment from becoming a theater backdrop in his work through his intimate, empathetic renderings, yet his consciousness of the “theater” that Chadds Ford has become for many art lovers thanks to the Wyeths and the Brandywine School adds a level of sophistication not apparent at first glance. By bringing into play these modernist, almost Magritte-esque themes of life as theater, Kuerner manages to inject the present into the past without losing the past as a separate and very tangible reality. Beneath Kuerner’s name on the cover of All in a Day’s Work appears the words, “nurtured in the greatness and simplicity of the Brandywine Valley tradition.” In his art, Karl Kuerner gives back to the Brandywine some of the vital substance and spirit that make that place and its people such a magical combination in the history of American art.

[Many thanks to Cedar Tree Books for providing me with a review copy of this book; to the Brandywine River Museum for the image of Miss Wyeth; to Qoro, LLC for the images of Percheron in Chadds Ford, In the Blink of an Eye, Out of Nowhere, and Charades; and to Karl and Louise Kuerner for their cooperation and kindness in the writing of this review.]

In the Beginning

We all know time marked as B.C. and A.D., but in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, time is still marked as N.C. Newell Convers Wyeth was born October 22, 1882 in Needham, Massachusetts, and was reborn when he came to Chadds Ford in 1902 to study painting under the illustrator Howard Pyle. Within a year, Wyeth’s work began to appear on the covers of The Saturday Evening Post, Harper’s Weekly, Scribner’s Magazine, and other notable periodicals of the time. N.C.’s career as an illustrator of children’s literature took off from that point, not only launching his own name into the annals of art history but also founding the dynasty that his son Andrew and grandson Jamie would carry on. Works such as Winter (above, from 1909) show the solidity and power of N.C.’s figures, which here seems as rock hard as the mountain he stands upon, the wind billowing his cape into another mountain range of fabric. Upon the rock that was N.C. Wyeth, a whole direction in American art was founded.

N.C. found his greatest and perhaps most memorable subjects in fantastic tales of children’s literature, illustrating such immortal works as Treasure Island, Kidnapped, Robinson Crusoe, and Robin Hood. Blind Pew (above), from Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island captures the dark danger of that tale while also harking back to N.C.’s Massachusetts roots through the inn in the background, which N.C. copied from a building in his hometown of Needham. The props N.C. kept around his studio for reference for these illustrations inspired his sickly son Andy to live out the tales of Robin Hood with his friends in the woods surrounding their Chadds Ford home, sparking the imaginative life that would grow into the mythological cosmos of “Wyeth Country” portrayed in Andrew’s paintings and populated by the simple people of that region. After travels in the American West in 1904 and 1906, N.C. added scenes of Cowboys and Indians to his repertoire.

Despite his growing success, N.C. felt the sting of the label of being “just” an illustrator. He struggled to paint in a more painterly style, painting his surroundings and the farmers working in the field, subjects his son would adopt in his rise to fame. Today, illustrations holds a more respected place in American art, with images of N.C.’s such as the struggle between the Native American and the British soldier from The Last of the Mohicans finally earning their due. The long, wide shadow of N.C., killed tragically with his grandson in 1946 when their car stalled on train tracks near their home, still looms over the Wyeth clan and the entire Brandywine Valley. Andrew, Carolyn, and Jamie Wyeth all have dealt directly or indirectly with the legacy of their father and grandfather. Even Karl J. Kuerner, grandson of N.C.’s neighbor and the subject of many of Andrew’s portraits, shows the influence of N.C. in works such as Out of Nowhere, a painting of an oncoming train that alludes to the tragic accident that actually took place on his grandparents’ farm. Andrew paid tribute to his father in his painting Winter 1946, which shows a young man navigating a huge hill near their home. That huge hill to be navigated is the memory of N.C. Wyeth, larger than life and yet even larger in the realm of imagination.