Between the Inaugural, Bush's farewell address and the Hudson River seeming to recreate Hitchcock's
The Birds, many people missed the news today of the passing of Andrew Wyeth at ate 91. Wyeth was an early favorite artist until I thought I was too sophisticated and started aping attitudes in
Artforum and critiqued him as being to sentimental and bourgeois. One of the first prints I bought in college years, above, was a Wyeth that many have lambasted me for its melancholy (echoes of the previously mentioned print in the kitchen). I always defended it as being contemplative and meditative.
I've not come completely full circle on Wyeth but appreciate him much more than I did in my mid-20s when I could not be bothered with someone so middle class. It's not as if I am embracing the works of Thomas Kincaid, mind you.
I was also fond of the Wyeth parody in
Rolling Stone in the mid-1970s of "Tanya's World" during the height of mania over the Patty Hearst "kidnapping". I wonder if Patty has any
Wyeths?
UPDATE: In part to prove the provenance of the above mentioned Wyeth print, here is Junk Thief 27 years ago in his 19
th floor Midwest pied a
tierre with the same print in the background, just left of center. The various copies of
Artforum in the background suggest that this was just before the print went into storage and was replaced to be a more appropriate
accoutrement with the
Breuer chairs, round vase and peacock feathers. However, we promise that it was not replaced with a
Nagel print even if Duran, Duran was in heavy rotation on the
Technics turntable, as that 'do of the moment suggests.
Labels: 1970s, Andrew Wyeth, art, Artforum, Patty Hearst
The San Francisco Chronicle may close? Is anyone crying? Is it sad that the family name behind it is no longer mythic, no longer a symbol that would inspire wacko domestic terrorists to resort to bank robberies and kidnapping?
