ANDREW WYETH DIES AT 91

ANDREW WYETH, the popular American painter of rustic landscapes, farmhouses and plain country folk whose pictures evoked a range of feelings and emotions and a nostalgic vision of times past, died at home early Jan. 16 at age 91. No cause of death was reported, according to the Associated Press.

Mr. Wyeth sketched, painted and drew the people and places of Pennsylvania's Brandywine River Valley and the rugged Maine coastal region near Cushing, where he had lived all his life. He died at his home in the Philadelphia suburb of Chadds Ford, according to Hillary Holland, a spokeswoman for the Brandywine River Museum, the AP reported.

His artistry was of fields and hillsides, wildlife, sawmills, springhouses, farmhands, farm tools, fixtures and furniture. It was symbolic and paradoxical, expressing tranquillity and turbulence, tenderness and rigor, cruelty and compassion. Some of it included such discordant details as hanging animal carcasses, rifles, hunters, meat hooks, peeling paint, cracked ceilings, fallen and sharply sawed or broken logs that conveyed subliminal suggestions of violence and decay, and a sense of loss.

One of the most widely recognized and highly priced American artists of his era, Mr. Wyeth was probably best known for his 1948 painting, "Christina's World," which shows a young crippled woman in a pink dress crawling across a brown field toward a bleak and distant farmhouse. In its degree of familiarity, this picture was once compared with the portrait of George Washington that appears on the $1 bill.

In the 1980s, Mr. Wyeth was the subject of an intense media spotlight for his "Helga" series of 45 paintings and 200 sketches. These pictures, many of them nudes, were the product of hundreds of modeling sessions with a Chadds Ford neighbor, Helga Testorf, over a 15-year period. No one else, not even Mr. Wyeth's wife, had previously known about them, and their disclosure to the public was arguably the art event of the decade.

A household name in the national artistic community since the middle years of the 20th century, Mr. Wyeth rose to prominence in the same period in which the abstract expressionist painters of the New York School were establishing their mark as the mainstream artists of the era.

His work was different. The abstract expressionists did non-representational compositions, characterized by what they said was a spontaneous and self-expressive application of paint. They often worked in bright and flowing colors with flamboyant brush strokes.

Mr. Wyeth painted in pale colors, lighter shades of brown, red, yellow and black, and the shapes and objects in his pictures were concrete and easily recognizable. Houses looked like houses and people looked like people. He favored fall and winter landscapes, which he believed gave the impression of a deeper and unarticulated meaning; his messages were indirectly conveyed. Rarely did he speak or communicate with others in his profession, and in his personal life he tended to be reclusive.

As an artist he was generally considered a realist, but he never accepted that characterization. "In the art world today, I'm so conservative I'm radical. Most painters don't care for me. I'm strange to them," he said in a 1965 interview with Richard Meryman for Life magazine. "A lot of people say I've brought realism back. They try to tie me up with Eakins and Winslow Homer. To my mind they are mistaken. I honestly consider myself an abstractionist. Eakins' figures actually breathe in the frame. My people, my objects breathe in a different way; there's another core—an excitement that's definitely abstract."

To many critics, Mr. Wyeth was out of touch with the primary artistic trends of his time, and the quality of his work failed to merit his popularity with the general public. Nor did it justify the prices people were willing to pay—a collection of Wyeth works including several of the Helga paintings brought $40 million in a 1989 sale.

"Compared to master draftsmen, Wyeth cannot draw," wrote Washington Post art critic Paul Richard in a 1987 review of an exhibition of the Helga paintings at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. New York's Village Voice newspaper called Mr. Wyeth's art "formulaic stuff, not very effective even as institutional realism . . ."

The prestigious Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York refused even to display the Helga paintings. "We had an opportunity to show the Helga series. We quite pointedly and as a conscious decision declined to do so," said museum director Philippe de Montebello in 1987.

And so turns the vicious world of art criticism. Note the tone of this obituary, also a product of the Washington Post.

Read it all

GALLERY CLOSES AFTER THREATS

The following entry is adapted from an earlier quick comment I posted on another website earlier this year after it reported the news that a Berlin gallery had temporarily closed an exhibition of satirical works by a group of Danish artists after six Muslim youths threatened violence unless one of the posters depicting the Kaaba shrine in Mecca was removed.

IT'S ABOUT TIME a few extraordinary Western artists step up to the plate to take a swing or two at this crucial issue. This is a very serious issue in terms of defending our own culture against the egregious assaults made on it by ruthless newcomers with their strange gods and ideas, and since I work in the arts myself, a painter, I know that few artists are tackling the Islamic problem with anything more than fearless silence.

In fact, just the opposite position rules. I'd surmize that 95% of the art being created today in this most political of cities, and I speak from the underground art movement, is frivolous and redundant, lost in fairy tales and harmless charm, and anything remotely "controversial" is dismissed. The so-called controversial art is hardly controversial any more because how many times can Christianity or homophobia or the president be attacked in the generic way that artists depict their hyperventilated disgust with religion, sexual mores, or politics, and it still be new, iconoclastic, or controversial? But with all the world in flames and blood, hovering at the brink of financial crisis, most of the "ruthless honesty" work is anti-American at worst, anti-war (pseudo-lofty) at best, and nothing is ever presented that even hints of global incrimination due the jihadists and their copious allies in shepherd's clothing.

But what can be expected otherwise? The art world, unlike the more recently abducted halls of lower and higher education, has long been the high-browed bastion of the liberal cognoscente, and today's system of wine-tasting galleries and its stiltifying air of mass dementia is now vigorously geared to the boilerplate Left.

Scandal is often the fast track in the whirl to "make" an artist, but history seems to prove that this model holds only when breaking "preferred" molds.

Let's hope Berlin doesn't bend knee to this Islamic nonsense compounded by thuggery. It will only encourage more outrage. Don't we all deserve better than this?

GERHARD RICHTER

GERHARD RICHTER IS AN IMPORTANT German painter whose work spans five decades. Most noted for his photo-realism images, particularly the ones that are blurred, just as they would appear blurred in a shifting photograph, Gerhard Richter was born in Dresden, Germany, in 1932.

Richter's artistic achievements vacillate between pure abstraction and a reconstructed form of realism. His realistic paintings, based primarily on personal photographs and images from newspapers, range in subject matter from the banal, like rolls of toilet paper, to the extremely potent, such as famous Nazi "doctor" Werner Hyde. The paintings have in common an emotional remove; the re-creating of photographic images points us toward our own possible emotional detachment to the influx of images in the world. A blurred chair, Jackie Kennedy, burning candles, family portraits—Richter lays them all out before us as if to say, Here, they are all the same. The insightful text by MoMA curator Robert Storr provides an in-depth look at Richter's life in postwar Germany, tracing the influences and environment that made his work possible.

Richter is by many considered a "conceptual painter" whose "paintings are statements about ideas for paintings". Richter himself said that he wanted to express "the inadequacy in relation to what is expected of painting" through his art, the inadequacy of the making of images and the critical examination of it. He is considered a master of "deconstruction" of formal conventions of painting. He kept a "skeptical distance from vanguardists and conservatives alike regarding what painting should be". According to Storr, all of Richter's works point toward "the basic loss of bearings"; he is "an image-struck poet of alertness and restraint, of doubt and daring". Whatever your interpretation of Gerhard Richter's oeuvre may be, he is a major contemporary artist.

BRITAIN'S FASCINATING MUSLIM ARTIST

AFTER REVIEWING the previous blog entry, I am pleased to note there seems to be a notable exception to my previous comment. And while many may speculate that it is always easier to comment upon one’s own culture and whatknots, it cannot be overlooked that Islamic insiders don’t often have the same luxury of criticizing the inner workings of its own culture than many others do. So in that regard, this particular artist’s reputation should be considered even more profound.

Sarah Maple is a British artist. Sarah Maple is also a Muslim. Here’s an interesting link to an interview of a young British Muslim, who also happens to be an artist named Sarah Maple who questions with audacity and style the conflicting aspects of her own identity.

Excellent interview. An intelligent woman, and exquisite rising young artist, Maple’s talent, humility, and intensity of spirit should take her far.