The death of Wyeth - the most famous member of the three-generation family art dynasty
- will likely rekindle the debate over his contribution to American art.
"The squabbling is kind of art-world politics over who owns modernism," said curator Kathleen Foster of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, who helped assemble the last major retrospective of his work at the museum in 2006.
Wyeth's pictures express for many the alienation of 20th century life and art, she said. Yet critics in the 1950s assailed him as a provincial reactionary next to New York abstract painters Jackson Pollock and William de Kooning.
"As we get farther from his work, we're going to recognize that he's just a different voice of modernism," Foster said. "This kind of quarreling over his status is going to fade, and he will be recognized as a great, great American artist."
Wyeth died at his home in suburban Chadds Ford, Pa., after a brief illness, according to Jim Duff, director of the Brandywine River Museum.
The son of famed painter and book illustrator N.C. Wyeth and the father of painter Jamie Wyeth, Andrew Wyeth gained wealth, acclaim and tremendous popularity during his lengthy art career.
Still, some critics viewed him as a facile realist, not an artist but merely an illustrator.
"One critic has called Wyeth the greatest living kitschmeister, while others have compared him to Edward Hopper or the Abstract Expressionists," said Milton Esterow, the editor and publisher of Artnews, which lavishly praised Wyeth's work in the 1950s but has since stayed on the sidelines. "I think the jury is still out."
The public voiced no such complaints, embracing his work over half a century and turning out in record numbers for the 2006 exhibit in Philadelphia.
The Brandywine River Museum in Chadds Ford, a converted 19th-century grist mill, includes hundreds of works by three generations of Wyeths.
"He was a man who had a deep understanding of the human condition," Duff said. "The world is a beautiful place but the world holds many threats."
It was in Maine that Wyeth found the subject for "Christina's World," his best-known painting. And it was in Pennsylvania that he met Helga Testorf, a neighbor in his native Chadds Ford who became the subject of intimate portraits that brought him millions of dollars and a wave of public attention in 1986.
The "Helga" paintings, many of them full-figure nudes, came with a whiff of scandal: Wyeth said he had not even told his wife, Betsy, about the more than 200 paintings and sketches until he had completed them in 1985.
Wyeth's world was as limited in scale, and as rich in associations, as "Christina's World," which shows a disabled woman looking up a grassy rise toward her farm home, her face tantalizingly unseen.
"Really, I think one's art goes only as far and as deep as your love goes," Wyeth said in a Life magazine interview in 1965.
Wyeth remained active in recent years and President George W. Bush presented him with a National Medal of the Arts in 2007.
"Laura and I deeply mourn the death of American painter, Andrew Wyeth," President Bush said in a statement.
His granddaughter, Victoria Wyeth, told The Associated Press in 2008 that he no longer gave interviews. "He says,
'Vic, everything I have to say is on the walls,'" she said.
