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An early look at the Andrew Wyeth exhibit in Seattle

By Maggie Wilson
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Photo from ‘Andrew Wyeth: In Retrospect’ at the Seattle Art Museum. 

By Maggie Wilson

Andrew Newell Wyeth was born in rural Pennsylvania on July 12, 1917. He was the last of his parents' five children.

From a young age, he painted the life and people around him at home in Chadds Ford and at his family's summer home in Maine.

An exhibition of Wyeth's work, "Andrew Wyeth: In Retrospect," curated by Patricia Junker, opens Thursday at the Seattle Art Museum. The exhibit will run from October 19 to January 15.

The exhibit features 110 Wyeth pieces. The collection starts with his early watercolors and ends with the last piece he ever painted: "Goodbye."

>> See photos from the exhibit here.

Wyeth is well known and beloved; his piece "Christina's World" is regarded as an American classic.

On display at SAM are several paintings inspired by Christina Olsen, Wyeth's friend who at an early age lost use of her legs.

“You have the most marvelous end to your nose, a tiny delicate thing that happens,” Wyeth once said of Christina while she posed. “I’ve never felt such delicacy. You know, she’s like blueberries to me.”

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Wyeth learned to draw from his father, illustrator Newell Convers Wyeth. A piece on display at SAM notes his regret at having never painted his father, a discerning man.

“He’d look at me like a Brahman bull when he walked in the door to criticize my work,” Andrew Wyeth once remembered. “And if he was glowering, I braced myself. In a few incisive words, he’d bit right at some puny characteristics in my nature.”

Featured at SAM are paintings inspired by German immigrant couple Karl and Anna Kuerner.

The Kuerner farm, where Wyeth once worked, has since been preserved as a National Historic Landmark.

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There is also a painting of Betsy James, Wyeth's wife, intimately framed with fabric from her mother's embroidered linen. He married Betsy in East Aurora, New York and they moved into an old schoolhouse near Wyeth's childhood home.

They had their first baby in 1943, a son. Two years later, Andrew Wyeth's father was killed by a train near the Kuerner farm.

The painting "Winter 1946" at SAM is Andrew Wyeth’s address of his father’s death.

"Over on the other side of that hill was where my father was killed, and I was sick I'd never painted him. The hill finally became a portrait of him," Andrew said of the piece.

And a few Helga paintings are at SAM: Wyeth painted Helga Testorf, a neighbor of the farmer Kuerners, in secret for 13 years. Helga, married with four children, worked as a caretaker for Karl Kuerner.

Many of Wyeth’s landscapes feature cold seasons.

"I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape: the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter," Wyeth once said. "Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn't show."

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Wyeth died in his sleep at 91 years old, during the winter of 2009 in Chadds Ford. He was buried in a private cemetery in Maine.

His last painting, "Goodbye," on display at SAM’s exhibition, has been shown only once before, at Wyeth's memorial.

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