Andrew Wyeth Temperas: 25 | 250

Andrew Wyeth was a realist painter best known for his enigmatic, tonalist portrayals of small town life in Pennsylvania and Maine. Wyeth received his artistic training from his father, the illustrator N.C. Wyeth, and began exhibiting locally in 1932. Wyeth received his first one-man show at Macbeth Gallery in New York in 1937 and quickly gained success among galleries and museums. Throughout the period of abstraction that dominated American art during the midcentury, Wyeth’s regionalist work was a strong countercurrent that remained an inspiration to landscape and figurative artists. In 1963 Wyeth became the first artist to be awarded the Presidential Freedom Award, followed by the Congressional Gold Medal in 1988. A Wyeth retrospective was held at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in 1970 and a one man exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art followed in 1976. In 1977 he became the second American to be inducted into the French Academy of Fine Arts, after John Singer Sargent. Wyeth’s work can be found in the Académie des Beaux Arts, Paris; Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; and the Palazzo Reale, Milan.

 

“I can't work completely out of my imagination. I must put my foot in a bit of truth; and then I can fly free.”

—Andrew Wyeth