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Andrew Wyeth
American, 1952
Blue Door
watercolor on paper
29 x 21 inches
© Andrew Wyeth, Delaware Art Museum, Special Purchase Fund, 1952
sponsored by
Something Waits Beneath It—Early Work by Andrew Wyeth, 1939–1969
Temporary Exhibition Gallery
Twenty-year-old Andrew Wyeth won national recognition for his 1937 exhibition of watercolors at New York's Macbeth Galleries. In 1943, critics called him a "magic realist," recognizing the often hard-to-define emotional nuances of his precisely rendered paintings. For over 60 years, in watercolor, tempera and drybrush, Wyeth has portrayed the places and moods of eastern Pennsylvania and coastal Maine. This group of early works is replete with the artist's imagery of weathered architecture, subtleties of landscape and light and unexpected viewpoints. Ranging from casually glimpsed to deeply studied, Wyeth's scenes are born of close observation, memory, and mastery of line and color, interwoven with his personal experience and feelings.
Something Waits Beneath It—Early Work by Andrew Wyeth, 1939–1969 is an intimate exhibition of early and seldom seen works by the young Andrew Wyeth, including watercolors of Maine and Pennsylvania made from 1939 through the 1960s. Illustrated letters, watercolors, and ink sketches, reveal the private observations of the artist—capturing glimpses of napping dogs, a bowl of holly, a nearby stream, a country kitchen. It is these very objects, animate and inanimate, that often disappear from finished paintings that provide the mystery infusing so much of Wyeth's art.
