Christina’s world is smaller today and so is ours. The painter Andrew Wyeth has died at age 91.

He and Norman Rockwell were the artists who most influenced me as a high school student in 1968. Both men could draw beautifully and I aspired to such virtuosity.

Later, as an Art student at Michigan State University, I learned neither man was highly esteemed among the art-world cognoscenti. At that time Abstract Expressionism’s popularity was declining, Pop Art was popular, and Happenings were happening. Representational painting was relegated to a cultural backwater.

Rockwell was dismissed as just an illustrator—a brush for hire—which he was. However, Wyeth was problematic. His work sold in galleries for substantial prices and he didn’t do commissioned covers for magazines. He had a loyal following and significant critical recognition. He was controversial.

Some will dismiss Wyeth’s oeuvre as a triumph of technique over meaning. And he may be dismissed as someone whose real art was crafting his reputation as an iconoclast. However, I believe that anyone who takes the time to really examine his work will find it compelling and transcendent. They will be transported to new places of feeling and affinity through his brooding palette of burnt umber, raw sienna, mustard yellows, greys and grey-greens. His renderings of the milky white overcast New England sky, and of people suspended between inhaling and exhaling—vacant, lonely and mysterious, will compel understandings at once undeniable and ineffable. He was a superb craftsman and a genuine artist.  

© Michael Maurer Smith 2009