Andrew Wyeth: A Secret Life - Softcover

Meryman, Richard

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0060929219 ISBN 13: 9780060929213

Publisher: Harper Perennial, 1998

Synopsis

"A revelation. No one will ever view Andrew Wyeth's apparently tranquil works the same way again after reading this vivid and astonishing portrait of the turbulent, driven man who paints them. Richard Meryman has written a wonderful book."
- Geoffrey C. Ward

At its most fundamental level, this stunning and unique biography describes a distinguished painter's enterprise of transmitting emotion onto a flat surface. It explores all the factors that have combined to create Andrew Wyeth -- his childhood in a hothouse of creativity; his hypersensitivity; his formidable wife; his identification with people marginalized and misunderstood -- all which have made him an American icon. In the process, his realist works in watercolor and tempera, including the famous "Christina's World," have gained him a special and secure niche in the history of American art.

The book is a portrait of obsession -- how single-mindedness has affected Wyeth's relationships and transformed his world into a realm of secrecy and fervid imagination. Those who read this book will never look at Wyeth's work as they did before. It reveals the artist's dark depths, as well as the ruthless, angry, child/man fantasist who paints the basic brutalities of existence -- death and madness --that vibrate eerily beneath his pictures' calm surfaces.

Richard Meryman's narrative is almost novelistic, with its larger-than-life characters and subplots: the tragedy of C.C. Wyeth; Betsy Wyeth's campaign for independence and individuality; the byzantine 15-year-long drama of the Helga paintings; the eccentric and creative Wyeth clan; and the idiosyncratic land and people of Maine and Pennsylvania.

Based on 30 years of research, frequent visits and countless conversations with the artist, his family, friends, admirers and critics, Andrew Wyeth: A Secret Life is the only book about the man and the artist that gets behind his carefully guarded screen, tells the full story of his life and reveals his complex personality and the motivations for his paintings.

About this title

Review:

Andrew Wyeth's achievement is unmatched by other modern American realist painters: he produced canvasses that became American icons, deepening our sense of the possibilities of representational painting in an abstract age. This biography, produced by family friend Richard Meryman, who first wrote about Wyeth for Life magazine in 1964, takes in not only Andrew Wyeth's life but three generations of Wyeths: the peerless illustrator N. C. Wyeth, Andrew's father; Andrew Wyeth; and Jamie, Andrew's son and a successful realist painter in his own right. The "Secret Life" of the title refers in part, of course, to the "Helga" paintings, sketches, drawings, and portraits (many of them in the nude) of Wyeth's neighbor, later his companion and assistant, Helga Testorf. The revelation of the "Helga" series gave the married Wyeth's life, at almost 70, a final dose of drama. This new biography, besides delving deeply into Wyeth's personal life, includes long discussions of almost every Wyeth canvas.

About the Author:

Richard Meryman, the son of a painter, worked for twenty-three years as a reporter, correspondent, editor, and staff writer for the original Life magazine. A freelance writer since 1972, he is the author of several books, including Hope: A Loss Survived; Broken Promises, Mended Dreams; and Andrew Wyeth (1968), a major book of the artist's paintings. He first met Wyeth when he wrote an article about him for Life in 1964, and has kept in touch with him ever since.

Meryman and his wife live in New York.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0060929219
• ISBN 13: 9780060929213
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 464