It is also interesting that Wyeth titled the painting Master Bedroom and depicted the dog at the center of the bed with its head on the pillow. Is the message that we are all masters of our own universe regardless of our species or level of consciousness? Wyeth has the ability to take a single simple moment and make us feel something very intense; make us realize that there is beauty and truth in the ordinary moments.
There is no need for vibrant colors or striking poses. It is the serenity of the sleeping dog that gives the painting its allure. The Master at Work Andrew Wyeth is famous for his representational paintings. The artist preferred to paint landscapes and subjects that surrounded him in his everyday life. Simple objects and ideas in American culture were his inspiration.
His fame and pertinence has endured because of his brilliant ability to infuse ordinary things with strong sentiment and a stirring power. Although the paintings seem to depict realist scenes, there exists always the presence of an emotional undercurrent, be it determination, beauty, or comfort. For Andrew Wyeth, Master Bedroom depicts a very significant moment.
He finds meaning in very simple objects and ideas and is able to present them in a unique way. It's what makes things sublime. It's the difference between a picture that is profound art and just a painting of an object. Wyeth felt that the painting would have been more successful without the figure in the field.
He remarked to an interviewer, "When I was painting Christina's World I would sit there by the hours working on the grass, and I began to feel I was really out in the field. I got lost in the texture of the thing. I remember going down into the field and grabbing up a section of earth and setting it on the base of my easel. It wasn't a painting I was working on.
I was actually working on the ground itself. In this unusual composition, Wyeth painted a person walking across an autumnal hill, but we only see the person from the knees down, wearing old, sturdy, brown boots and the hem of his coat blowing in the breeze. As is typical for Wyeth, the grass and the weeds that comprise the field are rendered with the utmost detail and clarity with his dry brush technique.
The horizon line is unusually high, and we see only a sliver of well-lit sky in the upper right corner. The main focal point of the painting - the brown boots - show much wear, suggesting a long history. The boots originally belonged to Howard Pyle, the former art teacher of Wyeth's father.
Betsy acquired the boots from another of Pyle's students and gave them to her husband as a Christmas gift in At the time, Wyeth was recovering from a major operation in which he had part of a lung removed. He found that the shoes fit and wore them to walk around the fields of Kuerner's farm as he recuperated from the surgery.
Wearing the former teacher's shoes must have also reminded him of his childhood when he would dress up in historical costumes his father kept in his studio. In Master Bedroom , Wyeth presents the family dog, Rattler, asleep, curled up and snuggled into the pillows of a four poster bed. Wyeth's granddaughter, Victoria, said in an interview that the artist had "come home tired one evening, wanting to take a nap, only to find Rattler had got there first.
They just take over the house. Wyeth perfectly captures the mundane nature of the scene. The simple white bedspread, seemingly worn in a few spots, covers the bed and pillows.
The room is unadorned; no pictures hang on the walls, but a small bowl sits on the window sill. The walls, painted rather gesturally, suggest old, discolored plaster. Through the window, we see a side of the house and a few branches of a tree. The light - a low, afternoon light - shines through window onto the end of the bed, not disturbing the sleeping dog. Evidently, Wyeth's wife did not think much of the picture and suggested he put it on the "giveaway pile.
In this controversial painting, Barracoon , a nude black woman reclines on a bed covered in white linens with her back turned toward the viewer. Her arms, bent at the elbows, rest in front of her, and her hands lie above her head. The subject is Wyeth's take on the traditional odalisque. As painted by Titian or Manet, the nude female becomes an object of sexual desire.
One also thinks of Paul Gauguin's paintings of young, dark-skinned Tahitian women lying on divans in exoticized poses. While Wyeth's composition also carries a sexualized tension, instead of a lush, exotic setting, Wyeth placed the figure in a non-descript bedroom, not unlike the one in Master Bedroom , and painted the walls in gestural strokes and scratched its surface, leaving a mostly abstract background.
In some ways this abstract setting, because there are no other distractions, intensifies one's voyeuristic gaze on the nude female body. The title of the painting refers to an enclosed, locked space where slaves and criminals were held. The reference to slavery coupled with the tradition of the odalisque creates an ambiguous - and fraught - mood and calls into question the artist's intentions.
Further complicating the issue is that Wyeth's subject was not the family's long-serving maid Betty Hammond, as he claimed for many years, but Helga Testorf, the white German woman he painted secretly for several years. Helga posed for the painting, but he changed her hair and darkened her skin to hide her identity from his wife, to whom he gave the painting as a birthday present. Wyeth produced several paintings of African American subjects with whom he had developed friendships over the years, and while it is undeniable that Wyeth had a yearning to know and understand his models in an honest and compassionate way, these paintings are not without controversy, as they bring to the fore the power imbalance between a white artist and a black sitter with the legacy of America's racial history.
The contemporary artist Hank Willis Thomas suggested that Wyeth "exploited, but not maliciously, as part of his brand.. It's not about him being a bad guy. But it's the question for any artist: When are you not exploiting someone?
In Overflow , the model Helga Testorf lies on her side, partially covered with a thin, white sheet, revealing her breasts and the top of her pubic area. Her braided pigtails fall over her breast and left arm while her right arm lies across her head and comes to rest on the pillow above her. Her eyes closed, she appears to be almost smiling, a rare occurrence in the Helga paintings.
The evening moonlight gently falls on her body from behind, and warm summer air seems to come through the open window. The voyeuristic perspective suggests the passionate gaze of the artist. The title may refer to the overflow of light on the model or the artist's lustful desires to be with her.
Ever since their debut in , the Helga paintings have sparked much speculation about the nature of Wyeth's relationship with his model. Wyeth always brushed aside rumors of an affair, but he said of these paintings, "The difference between me and a lot of painters is that I have to have a personal contact with my models. I don't mean a sexual love, I mean real love.
Many artists tell me they don't even recall the names of their models. I have to fall in love with mine - hell, I do much the same with a tree or a dog. I have to become enamored. That's what happened when I saw Helga walking up the Kuerner's lane.
She was this amazing, crushing blonde. If you can get next to it, it is a divine spirit. It's soul. He paints the soul. Content compiled and written by The Art Story Contributors.
Edited and revised, with Summary and Accomplishments added by Valerie Hellstein. The Art Story. Ways to support us. Movements and Styles: American Regionalism.
I see no reason for painting but that. If I have anything to offer, it is my emotional contact with the place where I live and the people I do. I think you have got to use your eyes, as well as your emotion, and one without the other just doesn't work. That's my art. It is important to forget about what you are doing - then a work of art may happen. The thing that pleases me most is that my work touches their feelings.
In fact, they don't talk about the paintings. They end up telling me the story of their life or how their father died. It's terrible. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn't show. I do more painting when I'm not painting. It's in the subconscious. Summary of Andrew Wyeth Andrew Wyeth, one of America's best-known Realist painters of the 20 th century, created canvases imbued with the mysteriousness of the real world, thus challenging traditional notions of reality.
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