The Vero Beach Museum of Art Shows Newly Acquired Andrew Wyeth

Written by Abigail Thurber Tuesday, 15 May 2012 23:16

Vero Beach, Florida.- The Vero Beach Museum of Art is celebrating its recent acquisition of Andrew Wyeth's "The Wales Farm" by making the work the centrepiece of an exhibition "In the Tradion of Wyeth: Contemporary Watercolor Masters" on view until January 15th 2012. The majority of the watercolors in the show are the work of living artists such as Kathy Caudill, Ray Ellis, William Matthews, Dean Mitchell, Alan Shuptrine, and Stephen Scott Young. While these masters of watercolor are great technicians,they embrace Andrew Wyeth’s sentiment that “to be interested solely in technique would be a very superficial thing . . . .” Without exception, they express great feeling in their work, while exploring the profound relationships between human beings and the world of the senses through their chosen medium.

Few artists in the history of American art have had more influence on the appreciation of watercolor than Andrew Wyeth. His ability to work with watercolor in a variety of ways, from “drybrush” to layered washes, and his flair for subtly dramatic composition gained new respect for watercolor as a serious medium. Many professional watercolorists working today owe Wyeth a debt, whether they were directly inspired by his masterworks or more generally by his larger-than-life presence in the art world. Andrew Newell Wyeth was a visual artist, primarily a realist painter, working predominantly in a regionalist style. He was one of the best-known U.S. artists of the middle 20th century. In his art, Wyeth's favorite subjects were the land and people around him, both in his hometown of Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, and at his summer home in Cushing, Maine. One of the most well-known images in 20th-century American art is his painting, "Christina's World", currently in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.


In 1937, at age twenty, Wyeth had his first one-man exhibition of watercolors at the Macbeth Gallery in New York City. The entire inventory of paintings sold out, and his life path seemed certain. His style was different from his father’s: more spare, "drier," and more limited in color range. He stated his belief that "…the great danger of the Pyle school is picture-making." He did some book illustrations in his early career, but not to the extent that N.C. Wyeth did. Wyeth was a visual artist, primarily classified as a realist painter, like Winslow Homer or Thomas Eakins. In a "Life Magazine" article in 1965, Wyeth said that although he was thought of as a realist, he thought of himself as an abstractionist: "My people, my objects breathe in a different way: there’s another core — an excitement that’s definitely abstract. My God, when you really begin to peer into something, a simple object, and realize the profound meaning of that thing — if you have an emotion about it, there’s no end." He worked predominantly in a regionalist style. In his art, Wyeth's favorite subjects were the land and people around him, both in his hometown of Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, and at his summer home in Cushing, Maine. Dividing his time between Pennsylvania and Maine, Wyeth maintained a realist painting style for over fifty years. He gravitated to several identifiable landscape subjects and models. His solitary walks were the primary means of inspiration for his landscapes. He developed an extraordinary intimacy with the land and sea and strove for a spiritual understanding based on history and unspoken emotion. He typically created dozens of studies on a subject in pencil or loosely brushed watercolor before executing a finished painting, either in watercolor, drybrush (a watercolor style in which the water is squeezed from the brush), or egg tempera.

The Vero Beach Museum of Art is located at 3001 River Park Drive, Vero Beach, Florida. It houses regional, state and national art exhibits and includes a sculpture garden. The Vero Beach Museum of Art is the principal cultural arts facility of its kind on Florida’s Treasure Coast. The accredited art museum includes art exhibitions, a sculpture garden, studio art and humanities classes, exhibition tours, performances, a museum store, film studies, an art research library, workshops and seminars, children and youth events, and community cultural celebrations. Since 1991, the Vero Beach Museum of Art has been recognized by the State of Florida and the Florida Arts Council as a significant cultural establishment through grant awards and support. The Museum was awarded accreditation from the American Association of Museums in April 1997. It became recognized for its professionalism, quality of programming, exhibitions, and community outreach. The Museum was reaccredited in April 2007. In 2002, the Museum’s Board of Trustees voted to change the institution’s name from the Center for the Arts to the Vero Beach Museum of Art, which went into effect on July 1, 2002. In February 2007, the Museum added the Alice and Jim Beckwith Sculpture Park, which is 1.12 acres (4,500 m2), to its exhibition spaces. The permanent collection of the museum includes ofer 880 works of art and is currently concentrated primarily on American art. however, the museum is also growing its international holdings in the area of contemporary art. Amongst the artists included in the collection are Milton Avery, Romare Bearden, Charles Bellows, Charles E. Burchfield and sculptures by Deborah Butterfield. Visit the museum's website at ... http://www.verobeachmuseum.org

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