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Andrew Wyeth
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"Andrew Wyeth is one of the most popular American painters of the twentieth-century. Interestingly, his representational work depicting rural Maine and Pennsylvania gained its widespread appeal in the 1940s and 1950s, at a time when the New York School of Abstract Expressionist painting reigned as the most advanced form of aesthetic expression. In 1949, the Museum of Modern Art's acquisition of Christina's World, 1948, Wyeth's famous representational painting of a young woman confined by paralysis to her ancestral Maine farm, was viewed as a shocking anomaly by many in an art world largely absorbed with pure abstraction. Careful analysis of this work and others reveals an underlying symbolism and deep understanding of the abstract qualities of light, time, form, and space. Wyeth's edited form of realism places his metaphoric work squarely in the twentieth century, despite its nostalgic patina of nineteenth-century rural imagery."
"Wyeth's art is very much an extention of his unique upbringing. It reflects his deeply-felt response to the rural environment where he was raised as a child and continues to live in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania (autumn and winter) and Cushing, Maine (spring and summer), where he was raised and continues to live. And it is a testimony to his artist-father, who, seeing in nature the spiritual pulse of humanity, taught his son to carefully observe and respect it."
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