Attempted Bloggery: Andrew Wyeth

Showing posts with label Andrew Wyeth. Show all posts

Wednesday, November 12, 2025

Heritage Auctions American Art New York Preview

Last night, Heritage Auctions hosted a reception in New York for its forthcoming American Art sale. These works and many others will be on the auction block in Texas on November 14. There was some high-end illustration art there as well, including a lot of scouting pictures.

Norman Rockwell

Maurice Sendak

Gutzon Borglum

F. W. Benson

Norman Rockwell

Howard Chandler Christy

J. C. Leyendecker

LeRoy Nieman

Andrew Wyeth

Augusta Savage

Norman Rockwell

William Glackens

Norman Rockwell

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Saturday, October 27, 2012

Blog Post No. 500: The Second Attempted Bloggery Quiz

The Second Attempted Bloggery Quiz:

Remember the First Attempted Bloggery Quiz? It was published with my 400th blog post, or so I thought. I subsequently figured out that I miscounted and it was my 403rd post. So it goes. I'm sure I'm the only one who noticed.

Now I'm reasonably certain I'm up to 500. What I'm not sure of is whether anyone actually took the first quiz, but that's not going to stop me from carrying on with a second. This is a blog that doesn't know the meaning of the word failure.

So here I proudly present the Second Attempted Bloggery Quiz. It mostly covers material from the last 100 posts, or should I say the last 97? If you are one of the billions who haven't yet taken the first quiz and you are so compulsive that you wish to do so before having a go at the second, by all means click here.

Correct answers are to be published Monday, October 29, 2012.

Directions: Choose the best answer for each. If there is more than one best answer, choose the bestest answer. Record your answers to all questions in ink. Hey, I'm not kidding this time!

Jeff Koons, Balloon Flower (Magenta), Christies

1. The most expensive work of art yet sold at auction by a living artist is

a) Balloon Flower (Magenta) by Jeff Koons

b) Flag by Jasper Johns

c) To the Unknown Painter by Anselm Kiefer

d) Abstraktes Bild (809-4) by Gerhard Richter

e) For the Love of God by Damien Hirst

2. After the first 2012 Presidential debate, this blog came out strongly in support of

a) Barack Obama

b) Mitt Romney

c) Big Bird

René Magritte, "La Trahison des Images" ("The Treachery of Images") (1928-9)
or "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" ("This is not a pipe"), LACMA

3. Google Translator publishes a French version of this blog with the title

a) Froggy et Bloggy

b) Le non Blog

c) Ceci n'est pas un Blog

d) Tentative Bloggery

4. The only artist currently to appear in more than one of my top ten most popular blog posts of all time is

a) Charles M. Schulz

b) B. Kliban

c) Roy Lichtenstein

d) George Herriman

e) None of the above

5. Many well-known personalities of the past are mentioned on this blog, including all of the following EXCEPT

a) Walt Disney

b) Walt Kelly

c) Immanuel Kant

d) Groucho Marx

6. I love posting drawings or even minor doodles by great cartoonists and illustrators that have not otherwise been available anywhere on the internet. To date I have done this with each of the following artists EXCEPT

a) Hank Ketcham

b) Edward Koren

c) James Gurney

d) Ronald Searle

e) Jean-Jacques Sempé

Andrew Wyeth, Christina's World, Museum of Modern Art, NY

7. Christina's World is Andrew Wyeth's most beloved painting. On this blog we've also seen

a) Christina's Bathroom

b) Christina's Bedroom

c) Christina's Closet

d) Christina's Garage
e) Christina's Kitchen

René Magritte, Golconde, 1953
The Menil Collection, Houston, TX

8.The number of people who publicly follow Attempted Bloggery after its first sixteen months is approximately

a) 19

b) 219

c) 419

d) 619

e) 819

9. The classic rock song lyric I quote most often is from

a) "Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy)" by John Lennon

b) "Truckin'" by Jerry Garcia of The Greatful Dead

c) "Squeeze Box" by Pete Townshend of The Who

d) "Life's Been Good" by Joe Walsh

10. To date this blog has had approximately

a) 28,000 page views

b) 128,000 page views

c) 228,000 page views

d) 328,000 page views

Again, the answers will be published Monday, October 29, 2012.

Update: The answers are here.

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Wednesday, October 3, 2012

Andrew Wyeth: Christina's Bedroom

You've seen Christina's World. But have you seen her bedroom?

Andrew Wyeth's most celebrated painting is Christina's World, on view in New York's Museum of Modern Art. It's a marvelous painting, seemingly full of unstated possibilities and, in its realism, strikingly different from the modernist fare that is the museum's bread and butter.

By contrast, I was just a little disheartened to see Wyeth's watercolor rendering of Christina's Bedroom from 1947 which was auctioned at Sotheby's in 2009. I guess I had hoped Christina might have a nicer room and a better life. The bedroom is relatively spare and stark, depicted with a bare mattress and bare walls. All of this seems to me to be a jarring contrast with the hope, determination, and limitless potential seen in the later 1948 tempera. Nice, stately cat, though.

Christina's World

Andrew Wyeth (American, 1917–2009)

1948. Tempera on panel, 32 1/4 x 47 3/4" (81.9 x 121.3 cm). Purchase

16.1949

Gallery Label Text

2007

The woman crawling through the tawny grass was the artist's neighbor in Maine, who, crippled by polio, "was limited physically but by no means spiritually." Wyeth further explained, "The challenge to me was to do justice to her extraordinary conquest of a life which most people would consider hopeless." He recorded the arid landscape, rural house, and shacks with great detail, painting minute blades of grass, individual strands of hair, and nuances of light and shadow. In this style of painting, known as magic realism, everyday scenes are imbued with poetic mystery. --MoMA

Andrew Wyeth, Christina's Bedroom, 1947

http://www.sothebys.com/en/catalogues/ecatalogue.html/2009/american-paintings-drawings-sculpture-n08555#/r=/en/ecat.fhtml.N08555.html+r.m=/en/ecat.lot.N08555.html/19/

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Wednesday, July 4, 2012

Independence Day by Andrew Wyeth

Andrew Wyeth painted Independence Day in 1961. His model, Tom Clark, is cut off from the rest of the composition by a column. Even then, he is not centered in the space created but pushed over to the far left. His attention is fixed on the outsized flag, so large that it billows off the right hand side of the paper. On the porch he is mostly in darkness but the flag is bathed in sunlight.

It can't be an accident that Wyeth chose a black model for this painting. The year 1961 was an important one for the Civil Rights movement. It was a year of the Freedom Riders and ongoing attempts at integration. The composition isolates Tom Clark from the flag, but this flag is broad and expansive, and capable of extending freedom to all Americans.