The Times today has an impressive obituary of Andrew Wyeth, who died yesterday in Pennsylvania at age 91.
His work has always hit me in the existential gut and seems to capture my childhood ennui growing up in the rural Midwest, feelings I can’t easily articulate but recognize when I see them on his canvas.
Of his work, Wyeth said:
“Let’s be sensible about this. I put a lot of things into my work which are very personal to me. So how can the public feel these things? I think most people get to my work through the back door. They’re attracted by the realism and they sense the emotion and the abstraction — and eventually, I hope, they get their own powerful emotion.”
For me, that “eventually” has always been immediately and I feel many must get to his work like that, right through the front door, which he seems to have left so invitingly open.
RIP Andrew Wyeth.
[And PS to MoMA: please find a better place for Christina’s World, than the cramped exit to the fourth floor gallery. It’s an inhospitable place to appreciate such a profound work.]
