American painter Andrew Wyeth dies

The Butler museum in Youngstown exhibited the artist’s work in 2007.

wire and staff report

PHILADELPHIA — Artist Andrew Wyeth, who portrayed the hidden melancholy of the people and landscapes of Pennsylvania’s Brandywine Valley and coastal Maine in works such as “Christina’s World,” died early Friday. He was 91.

Wyeth died in his sleep at his home in the Philadelphia suburb of Chadds Ford, according to Hillary Holland, a spokeswoman for the Brandywine River Museum.

The son of famed painter and book illustrator N.C. Wyeth, Andrew Wyath gained wealth, acclaim and tremendous popularity. But he chafed under criticism from some experts who regarded him as a facile realist, not an artist but merely an illustrator.

A Wyeth retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2006 drew more than 175,000 visitors in 151‚Ñ2 weeks, the highest-ever attendance at the museum for a living artist. The Brandywine River Museum in Chadds Ford, a converted 19th-century gristmill, includes hundreds of works by three generations of Wyeths.

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 the intimate portraits that brought him millions of dollars and a wave of public attention in 1986.

In the fall of 2007, the Butler Institute of American Art in Youngstown hosted an exhibition of more than 100 of Wyeth’s works from the Marunuma Art Park in Japan. Many of the pieces on display showed preliminary sketches of some of Wyeth’s masterpieces, including “Christina’s World.”

At the time of the exhibition, Lou Zona, executive director of the Butler, told The Vindicator why Wyeth holds a special place in the art world.

“Wyeth is the quintessential American artist,” said Zona. “He is a storyteller, the Mark Twain of contemporary art. But he doesn’t always tell the whole story. He leaves something up to the viewer ... you’ll see a woman looking out a window, but you don’t know what she sees.”