Hasta La Ideas

American artist Andrew Wyeth—best known for “Christina’s World,” his iconic 1948 painting of a polio-crippled neighbor in Maine—died in his sleep this morning at the age of 91. Wyeth, son of painter and illustrator N.C. Wyeth, favored rural settings, bleached cool palettes, and compositional choices that could nudge the familiar into the realm of the curious and the menacing. Even in a realist rendering of a sun-dappled bedroom, storm clouds were always approaching. “[Mark] Rothko‘s phrase, ‘the pursuit of strangeness,’ catches the key element in Wyeth’s voice, the discourse between the observer and the situation that it is a form of expectation,” wrote artist Brian O’Doherty.

Wyeth loved this time of year, “when you feel the bone structure in the landscape—the loneliness of it—the dead feeling of winter,” he once said. “Something waits beneath it; the whole story doesn’t show.” But Wyeth himself was far from gloomy. Check out this documentary clip from a few years ago in which he recalls his youth in the Philadelphia suburb of Chadds Ford…and visiting funeral parlors.

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