So, I’m pretty late to the game here with an Andrew Wyeth tribute, but I’ve been thinking about his work constantly since his passing on January 16th. I had literally been talking to my students about his work just hours before he died.

I didn’t care for Andrew Wyeth’s work at first. His subject matter was uninteresting to me, his palette was uncomfortably earthy, his brushwork seemed obsessively tight, and he suffered from the inevitable comparison to his father, N.C. Wyeth, who has long been an artistic hero of mine.

And then during my college years, there was a retrospective of his paintings held at the Portland Museum of Art, and it drew enough media attention that my good friend Jen Hess and I decided to go check it out. It was at this exhibition that I realized what my problem with Andrew Wyeth’s work had really been: I simply had never seen it in person. Wyeth painted relatively large—large enough that reproductions in even the most generously-sized art books simply cannot do justice to the work. The obsessively rendered tempera brushstrokes can only be appreciated when seen up close, because it’s when you see the work in person that you see the wild, expressive watercolor underpainting that lies beneath those tightly controlled brushstrokes. It was a revelation to me. A year or two later, I bought the A.W. biography by Richard Meryman, and was absolutely fascinated by the ferocious art spirit of Wyeth. There’s a memorable passage in the book where someone (can’t remember if it’s the biographer or someone else) recounts being in the studio with Andrew while he was painting, and his artistic process on that particular piece involved literally kicking and chasing a watercolor around on the floor, yelling at it the whole time and attacking the piece with fury as he worked. Not the process one would suspect from looking at reproductions of his paintings. But when you see them in person, you can see that chaos and fury peeking through the refined outer layers.

I prefer his watercolors to his finished temperas—they’re far looser and more expressive. Still, one has to respect the patience of his tempera technique and the kind of dedication it takes to meticulously create these paintings. This dedication to his craft was further proven by the creation of the infamous Helga series—in order to keep the creation of the works a secret, he upped his output from roughly four finished paintings a year to an average of seventeen in order to produce the more than 200 pieces in the series. There’s been much suspicion (and understandably so) as to whether he had an affair with his model, but if he did, he certainly was quick and efficient about it, because the fact remains that he more than tripled his normal output of work!

Wyeth has been dumped on by art critics for so long that it’s a knee-jerk reaction to many in the field. The most laughable has to be Hilton Kramer, who audaciously claimed that Wyeth “can’t paint.” It doesn’t bother me that some critics don’t like his work—taste is too subjective to ever be forced on someone, and it’s fine if someone doesn’t care for his particular brand of realism. But it rankles me when Wyeth isn’t shown proper respect for his prodigious, haunting body of work. Whether you are drawn to it or not, there is no question that he was an artist of tremendous originality, ability and power. For a great write-up on Wyeth, check out Charley Parker’s excellent Lines and Colors blog, where he posts an excellent tribute. Charley and I have essentially the same take, but he’s far more eloquent in his defense of Wyeth’s legacy.

Rest in peace, Mr. Wyeth. Thank you for the work.