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Unknown Terrain: The Landscapes of Andrew Wyeth makes an irresistible case for ignoring both Wyeth's sentimental champions and his cynical detractors. It's easy to understand either pole of opinion about this very American painter, but harder to get to the essence of what makes him excite such vehemence. In the end, it may simply be that he is very, very good, and like all good painters, a little too complicated for most critics.
For one thing, while Wyeth does have a special sensitivity for suggestive narrative elements, he is also an abstract painter, with a powerful sense of gesture, stroke, and pattern. Some of his watercolors are as thrusting and liquid as Jackson Pollock's drips, and almost as nonobjective. Other compositions can be as fixed as Christina's World, the huge 1948 painting for which he is perhaps best known, but within the strictly ordered confines of tempera, a painstaking medium, he still handles the brush with bravura. The authors of Unknown Terrain make an attempt to elucidate Wyeth's relationship to this century, and they succeed admirably--with the help of nearly 200 reproductions.
From Library Journal
Andrew Wyeth occupies a curious place in the art world: esteemed enough to have a major landscape show at the Whitney Museum of American Art yet denigrated enough that the catalog essays are all at pains to explain why it actually is appropriate to consider him an artist of top rank. The work in this show is recognizably Wyeth's, displaying his tightly detailed observation and cool surface underlain by suppressed passion. Several of his iconic temperas, such as Christina's World (1948) and Winter (1949), are included. But many unknown works are reproduced for the first time here, including many watercolors using a loose, unfinished technique. Overall, the show conveys an impressive technical mastery alongside an improvisatory freedom not usually recognized in Wyeth. This beautifully produced book from two Whitney curators offers images that will appeal to long-time fans and perhaps win some surprised admiration from skeptics. Recommended for both general and scholarly collections.?Kathryn Wekselman, Univ. of Cincinnati Lib., OH
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
