“Although Andrew Wyeth: Life and Death was conceived before the coronavirus pandemic, it is my hope that the exhibition will speak to the feelings of loss that have touched us all since 2020,” says Sheehan. In two photographs from Janaina Tschäpe’s series 100 Little Deaths, the artist inserts herself as a lifeless body in places she has once lived, loved, or in some way been intimately connected with. These feet could be menacing and/or they could be the viewer’s.
The imagined funeral is his own.Īs an inverted head and shoulders lying on the ground and observed from above by someone whose feet are just visible at the base of the drawing. Andrew Wyeth, in a rare self-portrait, lies in the open casket. Helga Testort is here, along with the artist’s dear friends and neighbors Helen Sipala and Anna Kuerner and Wyeth’s wife, Betsy James Wyeth, wearing her signature wide-brimmed hat. Splashes of watery pigment add a sense of immediacy and show a lack of preciousness the act of imagining and composing is primary, even urgent, and the artist’s love for refinement is saved for the likenesses of mourners. Known as the Funeral Group for their depictions of a graveside, casket, and mourners, the drawings are loose and energetic, with the marks of a confident hand moving through the spaces of the paper, considering and reconsidering. Wyeth (1917-2009) created these drawings when he was in his 70s, presumably as studies for a lost or never-realized painting this is the first time they’ve been shown publicly.
A series of drawings-mostly in pencil on sketchbook and watercolor papers and one largely composed in watercolor-are the foundation of Andrew Wyeth: Life and Death, a contemplative exhibitions on view at Colby College Museum of Art through October 16, 2022.
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