Andrew Wyeth’s Last Interview
Renowned Philadelphia-area artist Andrew Wyeth died this morning at the age of 91. In May 2008, Philadelphia magazine senior writer Matthew Teague spent days with the extended Wyeth family at their Chester County compound, including an almost unprecedented full day with Andrew that comprised his last public interview.
Having just finished a painting — a watercolor called Stop (pictured here) that might be his last completed work — Wyeth was ebullient, almost boyish (dressed, in fact, in a Robin Hood costume), as he discussed how his own past and the region’s past fused in his technically brilliant but melancholy art:
[F]or a long time, one particular acknowledgment eluded him.
“Why did it take the Philadelphia museum 90 years to give me a show?” he said, referring to the recent “Memory and Magic” exhibition of his work. He gripped the edge of the table and quivered his arms. “Ninety years! I was barely holding on!”
Philadelphia being Philadelphia, the city’s purveyors of art seemed fraught with the endemic sense of inferiority: If it’s local, it can’t be that good. So Andrew Wyeth waited while the city first perused Edvard Munch, Salvador Dali, Warhol. It didn’t help that some people perceive illustration — the stuff of Howard Pyle and N.C. Wyeth — as inferior to pure painting. “I think it’s hard for them to discriminate between that and the type of painting that I struggled to do, expressions of emotion and things that happened around me,” Andrew said, “whether it’s the death of a dog or a light on a branch or a leaf on the ground. Which is a very personal thing.”
Read the full story, Wyeth’s World, in our archives.
Photograph by Peter Ralston, from the August 2008 issue of Philadelphia magazine.
