Presenting recently rediscovered drawings, Life and Death explores what it means for an artist to picture their own death, in both the context of Wyeth’s late career and contemporary American art.

This volume presents for the first time a recently rediscovered series of pencil drawings from the early 1990s, through which Andrew Wyeth imagined his own funeral. Chapters by leading art historians explore the significance of picturing one’s own death in both the context of Wyeth’s late career and contemporary American art. The book connects the funeral series to Wyeth’s decades-long engagement with death as an artistic subject in painting, his relationships with the models depicted, and his use of drawing as an expressive and exploratory medium. It further inserts Wyeth’s work into a larger conversation about mortality and self-portraiture that developed in American art since the 1960s, and includes works by Duane Michals, Andy Warhol, David Wojnarowicz, George Tooker, Janaina Tschäpe and Mario Moore. While his contemporaries posed a variety of existential questions in picturing their own passing, those that interrogate the universality of death as a human experience have become especially urgent in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic and the national reckoning with racial inequality that emerged in 2020. Andrew Wyeth: Life and Death thus addresses ideas about loss, grief, vulnerability and (im)mortality that pervade the current moment.

The rich context behind one of Andrew Wyeth’s most beloved and mysterious late paintings.

Perhaps nowhere else is Andrew Wyeth’s highly distinctive style more palpable, or moving, than in Snow Hill. His masterful tempera painting of 1989 provides a visual and poetic summary of the Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, residents who had provided artistic inspiration at key points in Wyeth’s career. With the figures depicted in a snowy landscape high above Kuerner Farm, a property of great personal significance to the painter, this enigmatic composition resonates with an elegiac air. Among Wyeth’s most popular works, Snow Hill in some ways encapsulates the spirit of his entire career. James H. Duff, a close acquaintance of the artist for more than three decades, invites an expansive reading of the work, including the wide-ranging art historical influences on this singular American artist.

Published in association with the Brandywine River Museum of Art, Chadds Ford, PA

About the Authors:

Thomas Padon is the James H. Duff Director of the Brandywine River Museum of Art, Chadds Ford, PA. 

James H. Duff is former executive director of the Brandywine Conservancy and Museum of Art

Andrew Wyeth is an essential introduction to the enduring masterworks of this profoundly popular American artist. 

Published on the occasion of the centennial of the artist s birth, this handsome book highlights works spanning the entirety of the artist s seven-decade career painting the landscapes and people he knew in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, where he lived, and in Maine, where he summered. 

Many of his most important landscapes and portraits were created in and around his Chadds Ford studio, now part of the Brandywine River Museum of Art, with which Andrew Wyeth was intimately connected since its founding in 1971. 

A short introduction provides an overview of his life, and descriptive captions contextualize some fifty of the artist s finest and most beloved paintings, including Pennsylvania Landscape (1942), Wind from the Sea (1947), Christina s World (1948), Trodden Weed (1951), Roasted Chestnuts (1956), Braids (1977), and Pentecost (1989). Readers will also be treated to works previously unseen, such as Betsy s Beach (2006) and Crow Tree (2007).

Selected and Arranged by Richard Meryman from Recorded Conversations with the Artist, 1964-2007

Richard Meryman began an enduring friendship with Andrew Wyeth (1917–2009) while on the job as a Life magazine editor in 1964. For Meryman, this unique friendship yielded more than four decades of recorded conversations with Wyeth, his family, friends and neighbours in Wyeth’s homes in Pennsylvania and Maine. Meryman notes that, whether during formal interviews, shared meals, car rides or long walks, “Wyeth applied to himself the same sensitive understandings that fueled his art. A lifelong realist who swam against the art world tide of modernism, he showed himself to be fundamentally a painter of emotion – of people and objects that somehow embodied his memories and imagination, triggering feelings inexpressible in words, but recognized by viewers.” In five skillfully crafted monologues composed by Meryman around key themes in Wyeth’s work, we hear the voices of not only the artist but also his subjects, neighbors, relatives and critics. 

The book includes reproductions of the works of art discussed by Wyeth in his own words, as well as previously unpublished photographs of Wyeth’s studio taken in 2009.

One of Andrew Wyeth’s most important paintings, Wind from the Sea, a recent gift to the National Gallery of Art, is also the artist’s first full realization of the window as a recurring subject in his art. 

Wyeth returned to windows over the next sixty years, producing more than 250 works that explore both the formal and conceptual richness of the subject. Spare, elegant and abstract, these paintings are free of the narrative element inevitably associated with Wyeth’s better-known figural compositions. 

In 2014 the Gallery will present an exhibition of a select group of these deceptively ‘realistic’ works, window paintings that are in truth skilfully manipulated constructions engaged with the visual complexities posed by the transparency, beauty and formal structure of windows. In its exclusive focus on paintings without human subjects, this catalogue will offer a new approach to Wyeth’s work, being the first time that his non-figural compositions have been published as a group. 

The authors explore Wyeth’s fascination with windows – their formal structure and metaphorical complexity. In essays that address links with the poetry of Robert Frost and the paintings of Edward Hopper, Charles Sheeler and Franz Kline, the authors consider Wyeth’s statement that he was, in truth, an ‘abstract’ painter.

An extraordinary private collection of watercolours and drawings by Andrew Wyeth depicting the subjects memorialized in his legendary painting Christina's World, one of the best-known works of American art.

This book presents rarely seen watercolours and drawings Andrew Wyeth made of his friend Christina Olson, her brother Alvaro, and the weathered Maine farmstead where they lived. It features moving portraits and serene interior and exterior views of the house and the surrounding land, now memorialized in Wyeth's 1948 tempera painting Christina's World, one of the most famous paintings in the history of American art and now in the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Some forty-five works from the collection of the Marunuma Art Park in Japan, rarely shown before in the United States, are accompanied by works from the Farnsworth as well as by historical photographs of Wyeth, the Olsons, and the house.

Otoyo Nakamura writes about the history of this collection of Wyeth works, and Michael Komanecky addresses the place of the Olson farm in Wyeth's career over three decades, and how Christina's World and the Olson House have inspired pilgrimages for fans of Wyeth's work. Despite its isolated location and seasonal schedule, Olson House draws thousands of visitors each year from around the world. The Olson House, acquired by the Farnsworth Art Museum in 1991, has been recommended for National Landmark status.

About the Authors:

Michael K. Komanecky is Chief Curator at the Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, Maine; and former Chief Curator at the Phoenix Art Museum, and author of and contributor to numerous books, including The Art of the Missions of Northern New Spain (2008), Copper as Canvas: Two Centuries of Masterpiece Paintings on Copper, 1575-1775 (1998), The Folding Image: Screens by Western Artists of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (1984), and Robert Indiana and The Star of Hope (2009).

Otoyo Nakamura is Wyeth Collection Curator at Marunuma Art Park, Asaka, Japan.

Whether you're a casual admirer of Andrew Wyeth's paintings or an ardent fan, this retrospective album of his work from the 1930s to the 90s is both an outstanding introduction to the artist and a highly personal glimpse of his career.

The book presents 133 color reproductions of tempera, drybrush, and watercolor paintings and five black and white pencil sketches, and includes Distant Thunder, Green Room, Barracoon, and several paintings of Helga and of Siri Erickson. For every one of these pieces, Wyeth also offers his commentary describing the model or the scene, his mood or his technique, or all of these. 

Prior to the 1960s, Andrew Wyeth enjoyed a stellar reputation as a rising star in the art world. Since then, critics and scholars have largely ignored him. Wyeth, however, who is age 88 at the date of publication, has continued to paint, to the delight of his admirers, collectors, and the art-loving public.

Now, in association with the High Museum exhibition, Andrew Wyeth: Memory & Magic takes a fresh look at the work of one of America's most beloved artists. In examining his entire oeuvre, the book celebrates the artist's ongoing love affair with everyday life-domestic, natural, and architectural. Found throughout Wyeth's work, these objects form patterns that illuminate core themes and reveal the artist wrestling with issues of memory, temporality, embodiment, and the metaphysical. Organized chronologically and thematically, the book explores how the artist's approach to these subjects was formed in his early career and has been revisited in new and surprising ways in recent years.

Andrew Wyeth: Memory & Magic comprises 150 tempera paintings and 50 drawings and watercolours-including his most-famous works, but also many published here for the first time. 

About the Authors:

Anne Knutson is guest curator for the exhibition Andrew Wyeth: Memory & Magic. Kathleen A. Foster is the Robert L. McNeill, Jr. Curator of American Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Michael R. Taylor is Associate Curator and Acting Head of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Christopher Crosman is Director of the William A. Farnsworth Library and Art Museum in Rockland, Maine. John Wilmerding is the Christopher B. Sarofim Professor of American Art at Princeton University.