At the Art Museum: Andrew Wyeth and “Everybody’s Conscience”
Categories: In the News , Local Interest , Arts & Crafts
If you haven’t yet seen the Andrew Wyeth exhibition at the Cincinnati Art Museum, make time for a visit during this last week! The collection, loaned by the Marunuma Art Park, consists of 114 watercolors and drawings that lovingly capture the life and seaside Maine home of Christina and Alvaro Olson.
The independent Christina, who had an undiagnosed degenerative disease, refused all help but that of Alvaro, her brother. She preferred to crawl and drag her body through her increasingly dilapidated home and grounds rather than use a wheelchair.
Hence the posture and power of her reaching figure in Christina’s World (1948), Wyeth’s most famous work and one of the best-known works of American art. Christina’s World belongs to the Museum of Modern Art and does not travel because of the fragility of the tempera paint Wyeth used. But this exhibit features 10 studies, such as early compositional notations, detail studies, and the final watercolor sketch.
While the art, of course, is beautiful and very moving, this exhibit is also the best “read” I’ve had in a museum because of the very interesting background stories and Wyeth’s passionate, intelligent comments. He tells us that Christina is “everybody’s conscience.” Connected with studies for the Weatherside portrait of the battered Olson house is the statement “I’m very conscious of the ephemeral nature of the world.”
The work makes clear his determination to capture the nature of each bit of ephemera, from oil lamps and wooden buckets to the people he loved.
As an exhibition within an exhibition, the museum commissioned a series of black and white portraits of the Olson house by San Francisco photographer Linda Connor. Appropriately, this artist’s statement, posted with the collection, is “The strongest and most consistent content in my work is the investigation of the cultural boundaries between the natural and the sacred.”
Here are a few of the Library’s resources to learn more about Wyeth:
Two Worlds of Andrew Wyeth: Kuerners and Olsons (Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition)
Christina's world: Paintings and Pre-studies of Andrew Wyeth (reference book)
Andrew Wyeth: Master Drawings from the Artist's Collection by Henry Adams
Andrew Wyeth, Autobiography Andrew Wyeth: Memory & Magic by Anne Classen Knutson (2005-2006 exhibition by The High Museum of Art, Atlanta, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art)
Andrew Wyeth: America's Painter by Martha R. Severens
Andrew Wyeth: A Secret Life by Richard Meryman
