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Congressional Gold Medal Recipient
Andrew Wyeth
Remarks on Presenting the Congressional Gold Medal to Andrew Wyeth October 24, 1990
The President. Welcome, welcome.
Mr. Wyeth. What a day!
The President. We're so proud to have you here. Please be seated. Well, apologies for keeping you standing and waiting. But first, just a warm White House welcome to Andrew Wyeth, I'd say; to John Frohnmayer; and of course, to our distinguished Members of the Congress, Senators Heinz and Specter and, of course, Dick Schulze, who did so much to make this day possible. Welcome to all of you members of the family. We are very pleased, sir, to welcome you to the White House, and we're pleased to be honoring this man who has so honored his country with his art. As the legislative citation reads: We act today in recognition of Andrew Wyeth's outstanding and invaluable contributions to American art and culture. His detail-loving paintings of his native Pennsylvania and of Maine magnificently evoke homes and landscapes and friends, somehow familiar and dear to us all. He is, of course, one of America's foremost artists. He is known for his mastery of difficult technique and, especially, for the realism of his work. And I, too, have been trying locally -- though not yet with Mr. Wyeth's success -- to encourage a certain realism among the congressional budget artists. [Laughter] And I wish I had Dick Schulze's mastery, where he could get something passed unanimously -- [laughter] -- in the House of Representatives like he did this tribute to Mr. Wyeth. But you, sir, are no stranger to this place. In 1963 President Kennedy chose to award Mr. Wyeth the
Presidential Medal of Freedom -- the first artist to be so honored. Saying that this man had caught the heart of America in 1970, President Nixon sponsored an unprecedented exhibition of Andrew Wyeth's paintings at the White House. Today it is evident that Andrew Wyeth has caught the heart not only of America; internationally he has, for example, been honored by the French Academy of Fine Arts and the Soviet Academy of the Arts. His works have been exhibited and admired from England to Japan. I am delighted to present yet another first: the first
Congressional Gold Medal awarded to an artist. The Treasury Department's medal itself is quite simple and beautiful. It features a profile of Andrew Wyeth from a portrait by his son Jamie. Jamie, like Andrew, has learned much from a talented father. So, sir, your family, your friends, your admirers everywhere join Barbara and me in extending sincere best wishes and congratulations as you receive the Andrew Wyeth
Congressional Gold Medal. Congratulations, and we're so proud to have you. Note: The President spoke at 11:11 a.m. in the Roosevelt Room at the White House. In his opening remarks, he referred to John Frohnmayer, Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, and Representative Richard T. Schulze.
Charles Schulz, Congressional Gold Medal Recipient and Peanuts Comics Creator, had this to say about Andrew Wyeth: does have a secret birthday wish, though. "My goal in life," he said, "is to meet Andrew Wyeth" - the 80-year-old Pennsylvania painter who won the 1990 Congressional Gold Medal, one of America's most highly regarded living artists. "I'll never be an Andrew Wyeth, and that's kind of sad," Schulz said. "I wish what I did was fine art, but I doubt it is. It's well researched and authentically drawn, but I do not regard what I am doing as great art.
A solitary figure for many years in contemporary American art, Andrew Wyeth is a representational watercolorist and tempera painter who ignored the taste of the art establishment during the heyday of abstract expressionism to win nationwide popularity, inspire countless imitators, and earn the highest prices ever paid for the work of a living American artist. He is generally regarded as an abstractionist in that his trees, birds, and kitchen stoves, which look precisely like trees, birds, and kitchen stoves are likely to be metaphors for loneliness, violence or decay. His pictures evoke in viewers moods with which they are familiar---often meditative or nostalgic or tranquil and sometimes unsettling, and his perception of the interiors of houses, landscapes, and people indigenous to his home environments in Pennsylvania and Maine---his only subjects, is distinctly personal. As a draughtsman, Wyeth has been compared to the Flemish masters, whom he also approaches in the opinion of John Canaday of the "New York Times" (February 14, 1967: "In the exquisite adjustment of tone, color and emphasis that make the difference between the detailed reproduction of nature and a work of art."
Andrew Newell Wyeth was born in the idyllic Pennsylvania farming village of Chadds Ford, in the valley of the Brandywine River, on July 12, 1917, the youngest of five children of Newell Convers and Carolyn Brenneman (Bockius) Wyeth. The elder Wyeth's mother and father settled in Needham, Massachusetts. When he was a young man, N.C. Wyeth moved from New England to study with the illustrator Howard Pyle in Chadds Ford, where he built his home and studio and where all his children were born. His older son, Nathaniel Convers is an engineer; two of his daughters Henriette (Mrs. Peter Hurd) and Carolyn, are painters; and another daughter, Ann (Mrs. John McCoy) is a composer of music.
As the son of the well-known mural painter and beloved illustrator of Treasure Island, Robin Hood and other childrens classics, Andrew Wyeth grew up in an atmosphere that encouraged his tendency toward the theatrical. The collection of historical costumes and props in his fathers studio nourished his romantic fantasies, in which he was free to indulge because sinus trouble in childhood prevented him from attending school and private tutoring left him with time to fill in solitude. In his conversation with Thomas Hoving for the catalogue of his exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1976-1977, he recalled: "I played alone, and wandered a great deal over the hills, painting watercolors that literally exploded, slapdash over my pages, and drew in pencil or pen and ink in a wild and undisciplined manner."
Impressed by the talent of Henriette and Carolyn, N.C. Wyeth had begun instructing them in drawing at an early age. Andrew received scant attention until he was about fifteen years old, when he showed his father a toy miniature theatre he had constructed. In his academic training in his fathers studio, he gained an understanding of how to look carefully at and deeply into an object and to observe and seize its transient quality. N.C. Wyeth also taught his son the use of the materials and tools of painting, but did no impose on him his own technique.
The Wyeth family customarily spent the summer months in New England, at first in Needham, where, as a boy, Andrew acquired the feeling for pine trees apparent in his mature painting, and later beginning about 1927, in Port Clyde, Maine. His watercolor landscapes and seascapes of Maine, somewhat reminiscent of Winslow Homer, made up the greater part of his first one-man show, a sell out, at the William Macbeth Gallery in New York Clity in October 1937. Immediate success, however, did not reassure Wyeth, an exceedingly self-critical artist. Feeling that his work was too facile and spontaneous, he returned to his fathers studio to pursue realism by concentrating on the human figure and over a period of some months, at the suggestion of his father, drew a skeleton from all angles.
While continuing to paint his deft and flamboyant watercolors, such as his 1942 series of lobsters, Wyeth soon began working in egg tempera, a technique to which his brother-in-law, the painter Peter Hurd, introduced him. The medium of tempera, together, with the drybrush method he often employed, forced Wyeth to slow down the execution of a painting and enabled him to achieve the superb textural effects that distinguish his work. He exhibited his temperas at a 1941 Macbeth Gallery show and at the "Amercan Realists and Magic Realists" show in 1943 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York where he was represented in the latter category. Although he admired the vigor of some abstract expressionists, who were then coming into dominance, Wyeths statement in the shows catalogue made clear the difference between him and the avant-gardists: "My aim is to escape from the medium with which I work. To leave no residue of technical mannerisms to stand between my expression and the observer. To seek freedom of so-called free and accidental brushwork . . . Not to exhibit craft but rather to submerge it; and make it rightfully the hand-maiden of beauty, power and emotional content.
What Wyeth regards as the turning point in his life and career came with the death in October 1945 of his father, whose car was hit by a train at a railroad crossing in Chadds Ford. Wyeths paintings in several solo shows at the Macbeth Gallery and various group shows had earned critical respect for their lyrical and imaginative characteristics and indications of steady development in brushwork, use of color, and treatment of light. But referring to the death of his father in an interview with Richard Meryman for Life (May 14, 1965), Wyeth said, "When he died, I was just a clever watercolorist-lots of swish and swash." The tragic accident left him with the resolve "to really do something serious" with his talent and training. "I had always had this great motion toward the landscape," he told Meryman, "and so with his death, the landscape took on a meaning-the quality of him."
The increased importance of emotion in Wyeths work is evident in the poignant but restrained tempera Winter 1946, on which he concentrated for several months following his fathers death. He expressed his own feeling in the form of a boy running precipitously down a hill as the bright winters sun casts an accompanying shadow in flight. While at work on the painting, Wyeth felt much remorse that he had never done a picture of his father, but he said in the Life interview, "the hill finally became a portrait of him." It was at a crossing on the other side of the hill that his father had been killed.
Although the human figure does appear occasionally in Wyeths early work, such as "Rum Runner" (1944), it was not until after his fathers death that he began in earnest to paint people. Most of his portraits are of a single figure, unsmiling and reflective, transmitting a sense of loneliness. Mary Rose Beaumont suggested in Art & Artists (August 1980) that he found a surrogate father in Karl Kuerner, a German-born Chadds Ford neighbor whose farm, of 150 or more acres, had fascinated Wyeth since childhood. In 1948, after making many preliminary drawings, he painted what he considers to be his best portrait, Karl.
"Wyeths photgraphic realism is deceptively simple: it is built upon a many-dimensional relation to his work," Allen S. Weller wrote in regard to that painting in Art USA Now (1963). "Karls weather-beaten face corresponds to the weathered ceiling. The abstract flat surface aesthetics of the ceiling are brutally broken by the third visage of Karl, a juxtaposition as vivid in optical effect as a surrealists psychic impact. The psychic is not omitted, however-much is hung on Karls relation to the ceiling hooks."
Equivalents of ceiling hooks in some of Wyeths other pictures often have the effect, among others, of avoiding the "sweetness" that he deplores in much realistic painting. The jagged, menacing edge of a sawed log, seen through the window of a sun-filled room in Kuerners house, threatens the calm of Groundhog Day (1959,) one of Wyeths most widely admired works. Through such details as the log and the table set for one, the artist intended to capture what he called "the very essence of the man," Karl, who is not present in the picture.
Nor do the cattle appear in Brown Swiss (1957), his landscape "portrait" of the Kuerner farm. The painting owes its title to a pencil sketch of a Brown Swiss, but its inspiration came from a sidelong glimpse that Wyeth once had of Kuerners house reflected in a pond. In the process of abstracting and transmitting his impression, he made scores of painstaking drawings and watercolor sketches, eventually reducing the Brown Swiss to cattle tracks across the field and, as he explained to Hoving, making his predominant color "almost like the tawny brown pelt of a Brown Swiss bull." Other Wyeth pictures associated with Kuerner, who died in 1979, include the tempera Spring Fed (1967), and interior of the mild room; the drybrush watercolor landscape Evening at Kuerners (1970); the tempera portrait Anna Kuerner (1971) and the double portrait the Kuerners (1971).
Among Wyeths many works that belong to his Pennsylvania experience, but not specifically the Kuerners, is Trodden Weed (1951), a picture reportedly admired by Nikita S. Khrushchev, depicting the booted legs of a man walking on a brown hill. He conceived the idea for the painting while recuperating from a severe illness, when he slowly roamed the fields wearing a pair of boots that had once been part of Howard Pyles costume collection and watching his feet and the ground beneath. The painting may symbolize death itself or mans rejection of illness and death.
For Wyeth, the Pennsylvania countryside meant solid stone walls and soggy, rich earth, in contrast to Maine, which seemed to him "all dry bones and desiccated sinews," as he was quoted as saying in the catalogue of his Metropolitan Museum of Art show. But Maine appealed to him strongly because of a simplicity that he found to be disappearing elsewhere in America. He tried to epitomize the people and the land in portraits like The Patriot (1964) and scenes like River Cove (1958).
On his twenty-second birthday, while spending the summer in Maine, Wyeth met Betsy Merle James, the daughter of a newspaper editor. They were married the following year, on May 15, 1940. At their first meeting Betsy James had taken Wyeth to Cushing to introduce him to her long-time friend Christina Olson, who had been crippled by polio in childhood. It was her weather-beaten, three-story, steep-roofed, clapboard house, built on a coastal promontory, rather than Christina herself, that attracted Wyeths interest on that occasion. But Christinas personality and qualities that seemed to Wyeth to represent Maine gradually made her his favorite subject. The Olsons-Christina and her brother Alvaro, a blueberry farmer, were the Maine counterpart of the Kuerners. He was free to come and go in the Olson household, as he was at the Kuerners, and turned a second-story room in Christinas house into a studio.
Christinas World (1948), a tempera owned by the Museum of Modern Art, has a haunting appeal and broad symbolism that account largely for its having become probably Wyeths most popular work. Christina---whose crippled condition, like the peeling wallpaper of a Wyeth interior, does not immediately engage the viewers attention---drags herself through a blueberry field toward her distant house. Only her pink dream relieves the bleakness of the landscape. Wyeths tender, subtle portraits, Christina Olson (1947), Miss Olson (1952), and Anna Christina (1967), as Mary Rose Beaumont pointed out, make it clear that "Christina is not the eager, young yearning woman of Christinas World, but an ugly, hideously crippled middle-aged woman, whose quality of mind Wyeth admired to the point where ugliness is transcended in the loving truth of his portrayal."
Among Wyeths most memorable works are some of his interior and exterior paintings of Christinas house, including Wind from the Sea (1947), Seed Corn (1948), and Weather Side (1965). End of Olsons, a view of part of the roof and chimney of the house, was painted in 1969, the year after Christinas death, and is the last of his pictures relating to the Olson environment. But among his neighbors in Maine, Wyeth found quite a different subject for his portraits in the teen-age girl, Siri, whose father, George Erickson, he painted in The Finn (1969). The seminude Bikini (1968), the topless Sauna (1969), and the nudes The Virgin (1969), Indian Summer (1970), and Black Water (1978) belong to a series that Robert Hughes in Time (September 3, 1973) placed among "the solidest and least theatrical of Wyeths work." In his interview with Hoving, Wyeth contrasted his pictures of Siri, which represented "an invigorating, zestful, powerful phenomenon," with those of Christina, "which symbolize the deterioration and the dwindling of something."
Having rarely, if ever, looked beyond his Maine and Pennsylvania homes for his subject matter, Wyeth has long been confronted with critics misgivings about his narrowness of range. He insists upon painting what he knows best and what involves him emotionally. "Realism without emotion is dead painting. Like Normarn Rockwell," he maintained in his discussion with Selden Rodman for Conversations with Artists (1957). Talking with Hoving, he coupled the emotional with the technical in assuring quality. "Emotion is my bulwark," he said. "I think thats the only thing that endures, finally."
Because of his emphasis on his feelings towards his subjects, Wyeth has occasionally been charged with lapsing into sentimentality, especially in his evocation of the past. Some other critics also deride the anecdotal references in paintings like Distant Thunder (1961), in which a woman, Betsy Wyeth, lies asleep in a blueberry field on a summer day while the family dog nearby grows anxious about an ominous sound. But Wyeth is generally praised for lack of pathos in his treatment of old age and similar subjects and, to use Wellers words, "an almost animistic feeling for his rural milieu." Searching for a deeper meaning in whatever he paints, he strives to convey silence in the fall of snow, steadfastness in the flow of water. As he explores themes of distance, with recognizable objects that have meaning for them. His subdued, nonsensual colors, primarily earth tones, suit his melancholy, or "thoughtful," the word he prefers, outlook. "It is really rather odd," John Russell wrote in the New York Times (October 24, 1976) "that a nation which rightly prides itself on its buoyancy of spirit should identify so firmly with an artist whose specialty is the study of wounded or inarticulate natures in an unforgiving landscape."
A major exhibition of Wyeths work drew hundreds of thousands of visitors to the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia in 1966 and the Baltimore Museum of Art in 1966-67, and broke attendance records at the Whitney Museum in New York in 1967 before moving on to the Art Institute of Chicago. Enormous crowds also flocked to his retrospective at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in 1970 and to his exhibition, "Two Worlds of Andrew Wyeth: Kuerners and Olsons," which included preliminary studies of his paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 1976-77. His paintings are included in the collections of many American museums, including the Brandywine River Museum in Chadds Ford. Twenty-six of his paintings, constituting the most extensive collection aside from the artists own, are in the permanent collection of the Greenville County Museum of Art in Greenville, South Carolina.
In a choice reflecting public taste in painting, President John F. Kennedy named Wyeth in 1963 as the first artist to receive the Presidential Freedom Award, the countrys highest civilian award. Another president, Richard Nixon, honored Wyeth in 1970 with a dinner and private exhibition of his paintings at the White House. On that "first time" occasion Nixon toasted him as the painter who had "caught the heart of America." Wyeths other tributes include the gold medal for painting of the National Institute of Arts and Letters for 1965 and scores of painting and watercolor prizes and honorary degrees. In 1977 he made his first trip to Europe, to be inducted into the French Academy of the Fine Arts, becoming the only American artist since John Singer Sargent to be admitted to the Academy. The Soviet Academy of the Arts elected him an honorary member in 1978.
Andrew and Betsy Wyeth, who helps her husband in business matters and with exhibitions, have two sons. A tempera profile of his older son, Nicholas, (1956) in which Wyeth caught the evanescent quality of youth, was a favorite of President Dwight D. Eisenhower. James Browning (Jamie) Wyeth, a noted painter in his own right, was the daydreaming boy wearing a coonskin hat whom his father painted in the drybrush watercolor Faraway (1952). The Wyeth homestead in Chadds Ford consists of an eighteenth-century millers house, a gristmill now used as a studio, and a converted granary, all of which have been carefully restored. In Cushing, Wyeth lives in a restored eighteenth-century clapboard house. His fondness for simple things does not mean that his tastes are ordinary or inexpensive in houses, cars or clothes. He often wears suits with collars made by Pennsylvania Germans. The rangy blue-eyed-artist dislikes intrusion into his private life and is apt to be reserved at times. But his neighbors know him as a "down-to-earth guy" with a hearty laugh. "Hes a tease and a mimic," Amei Wallach reported in Newsday (October 10, 1976), "good at telling stories and doing all the voices realistically. At one point, he even thought about becoming an actor." His original work may be seen on the website:
www.awyeth.com Wyeth has received many official honors. In 1963, he was the subject of a cover story for "Time" magazine and, thanks to President John F. Kennedy, he became the first visual artist to be nominated for the
Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 1990, Wyeth received the
Congressional Gold Medal, the first artist to have that honor.
Andrew and his wife Betsy have two sons, Nicholas and Jamie Browning, the latter who has become a prominent American artist, and the former who shares with his father and his uncle, Nathaniel, a great fascination with machines, especially aviation.
The following is from Frank E. Fowler, the primary dealer of the work of Andrew Wyeth.
Biography written September, 1984
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