Here comes a mini blockbuster

From the PMA:

Celebrating the extraordinary life and work of Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009), this installation consists of two paintings and seven drawings by the local artist. Among these works are a sequence of studies leading to the creation of Wyeth’s tempera painting Groundhog Day that demonstrate the transformation and distillation of observation that characterizes his finest work. Wyeth and his wife, Betsy, donated these drawings to the Museum in July 2006 during the final weeks of the retrospective exhibition Andrew Wyeth: Memory & Magic.

Born in Chadds Ford, Pa., 30 miles southwest of Philadelphia, Wyeth was educated at home and apprenticed to his celebrated father, the painter and illustrator Newell Convers (N.C.) Wyeth. He made his solo debut at the Philadelphia Art Alliance in 1936, at the age of 18, and was launched on the national scene the following year with a sold-out exhibition at the Macbeth Gallery in New York. Building on that early success, Wyeth proved to be a painter of profound imagination, skill, and staying power across seven turbulent decades. Both admired and criticized for the tenacity of his realist approach and the unabashed emotion in his paintings, he produced some of the most famous and haunting images of the 20th century.

“All I want to do is paint,” said Wyeth, “and I paint the things I know best.” The everyday “things” found in and around his homes in Pennsylvania and Maine resonated with feeling for Wyeth, offering him pathways into memory and fantasy. His paintings of “things” were rarely straightforward, realistic descriptions: usually, the subjects have been simplified in the process of study, manipulated, and layered with personal associations, metaphors, and symbols that express larger themes of loss, death, and the passage of time.

Curator: Michael Taylor, The Muriel and Philip Berman Curator of Modern Art
Location: Gallery 119, first floor