Critics May Dislike Andrew Wyeth, but His Work Admired Outside the Establishment

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Andrew Wyeth
Photo of Andrew Wyeth courtesy of Peter Ralston.

Chadds Ford native Andrew Wyeth has the love and admiration of the general public, but critical acclaim is still largely absent for the painter who is best known for his highly detailed depictions of rural life, writes Daniel Grant for Observer.com.

“I think he’s O.K. — he is sophisticated although kind of boring. Dead and dry,” The New Yorker’s Peter Schjeldahl said, which is actually an upgrade for Wyeth in the eyes of the art critic.

In the past, Schjeldahl has called the artist “immune to fevers of imagination apart from the most idly literal-minded kind” and called his artwork “formulaic stuff not very effective even as illustrational ‘realism.’”

Critics have certainly held the artist’s conservative political leanings against him. For example, in Wyeth’s New York Times obituary, critic Michael Kimmelman found it relevant to point out that “he voted for Nixon and Reagan.”

Time magazine’s Robert Hughes disparagingly described Wyeth’s art as suggesting “a frugal, bare-bones rectitude, glazed by nostalgia but incarnated in real objects, which millions of people look back upon as the lost marrow of American history.”

Meanwhile, some of the largest crowds at the Museum of Modern Art are huddled around Wyeth’s 1948 painting Christina’s World. It is hung next to one of the escalators and probably reflects the curators’ distaste for what is arguably the museum’s most famous painting.

“I once asked a guard at the Modern what questions he received most often,” said Jamie Wyeth, the artist’s son and a painter himself. “He said, ‘Where’s the men’s room?’ and ‘Where is Christina’s World?’”

Next year, starting June 24, the Brandywine River Museum of Art is opening a Wyeth retrospective that will include 100 works (drawings, temperas, and watercolors) from the 1930s until shortly before his death.

Click here to read more about Andrew Wyeth from Observer.com.

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