Wyeth, Andrew

Andrew Wyeth: Memory & Magic

Prior to the 1960s, Andrew Wyeth enjoyed a stellar reputation as a rising star in the art world. Since then, critics and scholars have largely ignored him. Wyeth, however, who is age 88 at the date of publication, has continued to paint, to the delight of his admirers, collectors, and the art-loving public. Now, in association with the High Museum exhibition, Andrew Wyeth: Memory & Magic takes a fresh look at the work of one of America's most beloved artists.In examining his entire oeuvre, the book celebrates the artist's ongoing love affair with everyday life-domestic, natural, and architectural. Found throughout Wyeth's work, these objects form patterns that illuminate core themes and reveal the artist wrestling with issues of memory, temporality, embodiment, and the metaphysical. Organized chronologically and thematically, the book explores how the artist's approach to these subjects was formed in his early career, and has been revisited in new and surprising ways in recent years.Andrew Wyeth: Memory & Magic comprises 150 tempera paintings and 50 drawings and watercolors-including his most-famous works, but also many published here for the first time.

Andrew Wyeth: Autobiography

The most comprehensive edition of the artist's work ever published reproduces 138 paintings, including Wyeth's most recognized works, along with his comments about each one and reflections on his life. National ad/promo. BOMC selection.

Andrew Wyeth: A Secret Life

Andrew Wyeth's achievement is unmatched by other modern American realist painters: he produced canvasses that became American icons, deepening our sense of the possibilities of representational painting in an abstract age. This biography, produced by family friend Richard Meryman, who first wrote about Wyeth for Life magazine in 1964, takes in not only Andrew Wyeth's life but three generations of Wyeths: the peerless illustrator N. C. Wyeth, Andrew's father; Andrew Wyeth; and Jamie, Andrew's son and a successful realist painter in his own right. The "Secret Life" of the title refers in part, of course, to the "Helga" paintings, sketches, drawings, and portraits (many of them in the nude) of Wyeth's neighbor, later his companion and assistant, Helga Testorf. The revelation of the "Helga" series gave the married Wyeth's life, at almost 70, a final dose of drama. This new biography, besides delving deeply into Wyeth's personal life, includes long discussions of almost every Wyeth canvas.

"A revelation. No one will ever view Andrew Wyeth's apparently tranquil works the same way again after reading this vivid and astonishing portrait of the turbulent, driven man who paints them. Richard Meryman has written a wonderful book."
- Geoffrey C. Ward

At its most fundamental level, this stunning and unique biography describes a distinguished painter's enterprise of transmitting emotion onto a flat surface. It explores all the factors that have combined to create Andrew Wyeth -- his childhood in a hothouse of creativity; his hypersensitivity; his formidable wife; his identification with people marginalized and misunderstood -- all which have made him an American icon. In the process, his realist works in watercolor and tempera, including the famous "Christina's World," have gained him a special and secure niche in the history of American art.

The book is a portrait of obsession -- how single-mindedness has affected Wyeth's relationships and transformed his world into a realm of secrecy and fervid imagination. Those who read this book will never look at Wyeth's work as they did before. It reveals the artist's dark depths, as well as the ruthless, angry, child/man fantasist who paints the basic brutalities of existence -- death and madness --that vibrate eerily beneath his pictures' calm surfaces.

Richard Meryman's narrative is almost novelistic, with its larger-than-life characters and subplots: the tragedy of C.C. Wyeth; Betsy Wyeth's campaign for independence and individuality; the byzantine 15-year-long drama of the Helga paintings; the eccentric and creative Wyeth clan; and the idiosyncratic land and people of Maine and Pennsylvania.

Based on 30 years of research, frequent visits and countless conversations with the artist, his family, friends, admirers and critics, Andrew Wyeth: A Secret Life is the only book about the man and the artist that gets behind his carefully guarded screen, tells the full story of his life and reveals his complex personality and the motivations for his paintings.

Andrew Wyeth: Master Drawings from the Artist's Collection

This book presents drawings that Andrew Wyeth retained for his own collection -- many preliminary to well-known paintings. Created over more than five decades, from 1951 to 2005, they range from portraits of family members and friends to vibrant depictions of objects, landscapes, and buildings in and around the artist's homes in Pennsylvania and Maine. These works reflect the insight, emotion, and technique that are uniquely his. They demonstrate Wyeth's extraordinary skill as a draftsman and the accuracy with which he sees light and dark, enabling him to model forms while suggesting the very substance and texture of what he sees.

"I have always been powerfully affected by Andrew Wyeth's drawings and studies -- particularly those studies that do not attempt to cover the whole surface of the paper but instead focus on a few elements, so that the image seems to emerge magically from the empty white background, rather like a photograph that we observe in the process of development." -- Henry Adams

An American Vision: Three Generations of Wyeth Art: N.C. Wyeth, Andrew Wyeth, James Wyeth

From a major international exhibition, this stunning book captures three generations of art by the Wyeth family. This comprehensive collection is now in a paperback identical to the original clothbound edition. 130 color, 54 black-and-white illustrations.

Andrew Wyeth: The Helga Pictures

Wyeth at Kuerners

Christina's World: Paintings and Prestudies of Andrew Wyeth

Andrew Wyeth: Close Friends

Generally regarded by as "America's Painter," realist Andrew Wyeth is perhaps the most well know of the artistic Wyeth family dynasty which includes his father N. C. Wyeth, sister Henriette Hurd, and son Jamie Wyeth. Although most recent explorations of this artist have focused on his family and on the Helga pictures, this unique publication chronicles seven decades of an under-appreciated yet historically relevant aspect of his relationship to home and community. Andrew Wyeth: Close Friends is the first critical look at a significant body of paintings and works on paper depicting Wyeth's African-American friends and neighbors in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, a quaint village on the Brandywine River where he has lived since birth.

Beginning in the 1930s, many of Wyeth's African-American neighbors served as his models both in and out of the studio. Images of over 20 individuals are included, as well as depictions of their homes, farms, and meeting places. Wyeth's own words annotate the reproductions of his paintings and drawings and offer a rare glimpse into the mind of this truly individual artist. In her brief introduction, the artist's wife and collaborator, Betsy James Wyeth, recounts her arrival in Chadds Ford as a young bride and her immediate connection to the community she found there.

Andrew Wyeth: Close Friends includes over 100 color reproductions of major tempera and watercolor paintings and numerous black and white images of graphite drawings. Works reproduced are drawn from public and private collections, with a large number from the personal collection of the Wyeths. In addition to a foreword by museum director R. Andrew Maass, the book includes family photographs and facsimiles of personal correspondence.

Christina Olson: Her World Beyond the Canvas