Obituaries

Famous painter Andrew Wyeth, 91, has died. He was known for his realist paintings of people and landscapes such as "Christina's World." As mentioned in the article, some morons who would praise to the rafters "artists" who just throw a slab of paint on a canvas and the critics would call "masterpieces" tried to trivialize his work by calling them "illustrations" or other such insults.

Most people thought otherwise.

Oh, is this ever true:

Because of his popularity, a bad sign to many art world insiders, Wyeth came to represent middle-class values and ideals that modernism claimed to reject, so that arguments about his work extended beyond painting to societal splits along class, geographical and educational lines. One art historian, in response to a 1977 survey in Art News magazine about the most underrated and overrated artists of the century, nominated Wyeth for both categories.

Art critics mostly heaped abuse on his work, saying he gave realism a bad name. Supporters said he spoke to the silent majority who jammed his exhibitions. “In today’s scrambled-egg school of art, Wyeth stands out as a wild-eyed radical,” one journalist wrote in 1963, speaking for the masses. “For the people he paints wear their noses in the usual place, and the weathered barns and bare-limbed trees in his starkly simple landscapes are more real than reality.”

And what about "Christina's World"? From Wikipedia:

Painted in 1948, this tempera work is displayed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It depicts Christina Olson, who had an undiagnosed muscular deterioration that paralyzed her lower body—likely Polio. She, her brother, and Wyeth's neighbors are the subjects of a number of paintings of Wyeth. Surprisingly, although Christina is the artistic subject of Wyeth's masterpiece, she was not the model - Wyeth's wife Betsy instead posed for the painting.

The house in Cushing, Maine, where Wyeth had been staying when he saw the scene that inspired the painting, still stands. Wyeth took artistic license in its depiction, separating the barn from the house and changing the lay of the land. Known as the Olson house, it is on the National Register of Historic Places.

And from the Times:

Wyeth had seen Christina Olson, crippled from the waist down, dragging herself across a Maine field, “like a crab on a New England shore,” he recalled. To him she was a model of dignity who refused to use a wheelchair and preferred to live in squalor rather than be beholden to anyone. It was dignity of a particularly dour, hardened, misanthropic sort, to which Wyeth throughout his career seemed to gravitate. Olson is shown in the picture from the back. She was 55 at the time. (She died 20 years later, having become a frequent subject in his art; her death made the national news thanks to Wyeth’s popularity.)