18701970 The Metropolitan Museum of Art FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE New York, N.Y. 10028 212 879 5500 FACT SHEET: TWO WORLDS OF : KUERNERS AND OLSONS

Title: Two Worlds of Andrew Wyeth: Kuerners and Olsons

Press Preview Tuesday, October 12th, from 10:00 a.m. to noon.

Dates: Saturday, October 16th,through February 6th, 1977

Sponsor: The exhibition has been made possible by a generous gift from Mr. and Mrs. Joseph E. Levine. Mr. Levine is the well-known motion picture executive and has been a close friend of the artist for 15 years.

Exhibition: Two Worlds of Andrew Wyeth: Kuerners and Olsons will be a major exhibition of the work of one of America's greatest living artists. The exhibition will be organized around key paintings from the two environ­ ments that have dominated Wyeth's vision throughout his career: the at Chadd's Ford, Pennsylvania, and the Olson house and farm in Cushing, Maine. Among the well-known paintings on view will be Brown Swiss, Snow Flurries, Evening at Kuerners, Ground Hog Day, , Christina's World, and Weather Side. For the first time not only the finished paintings will be shown, but also the studies -- the preliminary drawings and watercolors -- which lead to the finished tempera paintings. By showing the finished pictures with their studies the exhibition will offer the viewer the chance to see how Andrew Wyeth has achieved his subtle, profoundly abstract realism.

Thomas Hoving, Director of the Metropolitan Museum and organizer of the exhibition, has said: "For forty years Andrew Wyeth has been a serious and highly acclaimed practioner of an observed non-photographic American realism. In this show, unknown sketches, drawings and watercolors which reveal Wyeth to be an intuitive artist will be shown with the more highly finished temperas by which, for the most part, he has chosen to be known.

"I am delighted," Hoving continued, "that Mr. Wyeth is working closely with the Museum on all aspects and

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details of the show from preliminary planning right through to its opening."

Andrew Wyeth has been for decades one of the most popular contemporary artists, but at the same time his paintings have been somewhat misunderstood. Typical responses range from citing his works as honest bulwarks of clarity against effete, degenerate, abstract art, to calling his work sickeningly popular, purposely reactionary and coldly trite. Such responses are based upon less than careful examination of the paintings. This exhibition will attempt to reveal something of the nature of Wyeth's art, to complicate, rather than simplify, the visitor's response to it.

The exhibition will take its form from a series of conversations between Messrs. Wyeth and Hoving. These conversations constitute the bulk of the heavily-illustrated exhibition catalogue, and they are Wyeth's first substan­ tial discussion of his art to be published in 15 years. Both the catalogue and the exhibition must be considered a preface to future things for it is the Museum's inten­ tion to prepare a catalogue raisonee of all of Andrew Wyeth's production at Kuerners and Olsons.

The exhibition is being organized by Thomas Hoving, Director of the Metropolitan Museum, with the assistance of John Buchanan, Special Asssistant to the Director and Registrar; John K. Howat, Curator of the Department of American Paintings and Sculpture, is coordinator; the installation is being designed by Jeffrey Serwatien, staff designer in the Design Department.

Background on Wyeth and excerpts from the catalogue:

Andrew Wyeth was born the youngest child of the famous illustrator N. C. Wyeth. The elder Wyeth guided his son's artistic training with great sensitivity. At first the boy Andrew, who had great natural ability, roamed at will over the Pennsylvania hills, painting and drawing with a wild, free enthusiasm. When Andrew was 16 his father took him into the studio and introduced him to academic training. Slowly Andrew became fascinated with the precise observation of academic discipline. Wyeth said of this in the exhibition catalogue: "I got as intoxicated by it as I had been by throwing paint and ink around exuberantly in my earliest work. I suddenly realized that I wasn't after an image of something or an illusion of something. I quite literally wanted to have — in my own vision of it, of course, — the real (MORE) FACT SHEET: TWO WORLDS OF ANDREW WYETH: KUERNERS AND OLSONS PAGE 3

object itself, or at least primarily the real object and only a little illusion. It was, in a sense, an almost primitive point of view, somewhat similar to the works of the Italian primitives of the 13th and 14th centuries."

When he was 18 or 19, Andrew had his first New York show of watercolors. It was a great success and gave him confidence, but he felt he was still too deft, too free. He returned to the training of his father's studio for some years more. One of the results of Wyeth's training, of his intense concentration on capturing an object, is a quality in his art which Hoving called in the exhibition catalogue "aroundness: the feeling that everything, whether it's a hill or a house, a figure or a branch of a tree, has been observed from all sides, many times, and locked into Wyeth's memory."

Wyeth's well-known technical ability is sometimes seen as the goal of his art rather than as merely a tool. But, as Wyeth said: "Technique is not what interests me. To me, my art is deeply the question of whether or not I can find the thing that expresses the way I feel at a particular time about my own life and my own emotions, The only thing that I want and search for is the growth and depth of my emotion towards a given object. In that way I free myself from the bonds of routine technical quality."

Wyeth works in four media: drawing, watercolor, dry- brush and tempera. Each medium is extremely important in expressing the various natures of his personality and the various aspects of a subject. For Wyeth, pencil drawing is a very emotional, quick, very abrupt medium, which he likens to fencing. Watercolor perfectly expresses the free side of his nature. Drybrush has another quality and is intermedi­ ate between the free drawing and watercolor and the exacting discipline of tempera. Part of Wyeth's admiration for Durer comes from his profound appreciation of the Renaissance master's beautiful drybrush paintings. Tempera requires a slow, building, "weaving" process. He loves the natural colors of tempera pigments and the quality which Wyeth has called "dryness—almost a lost feeling. There is some­ thing very beautiful and enduring about tempera." He completes perhaps two temperas a year.

Andrew Wyeth has been profoundly influenced by the environments in which he has lived. Except for an early boyhood in Needham, Massachusetts, he has spent most of his life around Chadd's Ford, Pennsylvania, and Cushing, Maine.

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He has never travelled. "I'm not much for the new thing or the new object, he said. There are always, new.emotipns in going back to something that.I know very well. I suppose, this is very odd, because most people have to find fresh things to" paints To make an old thing I've seen for years seem fresh is much more exciting to me."

Of the essential environments in Wyeth's life, Kuerners in Pennsylvania and Olsons in Maine are probably the most important. Described briefly: "One has the colors of Pennsylvania and the surrounding area, the strength of the land, the enduring quality of it, the solidity of it; the other is spidery if you wish, light in color, windy perhaps, sometimes foggy, giving the general impression sometimes of skeltons rattling in the attic."

Wyeth has known Kuerners Farm all his life --he was born just over the hill -- and he wandered all over it as a boy. He has always come and gone at will, using all parts of the house and farm as informal studios. Wyeth has always liked what he calls the utilitarian, abstract, quality of the farm, where everything has a use. Wyeth has deep emotional envolvements with the place. N. C. Wyeth was killed on the railroad tracks which run through the farm, and which appear in some of his son's pictures. Wyeth always had a close relationship to the Kuerners, who came to Chadd's Ford from the Black Forest after the First World War. Karl, the hunter and former soldier, liked to shoot things. His wife Anna disliked guns and all they imply. Their person­ alties charge many of Wyeth's pictures from Kuerners, which are often rather somber in tone.

Although Wyeth had known the coast of Maine since childhood, he did not meet Christina Olson and her brother Alvaro until he was 22. He was introduced to them by his future wife, Betsy James, who had been close to Christina all her life. Wyeth was immediately assimilated into this environment just as he had been at Kuerners. Wyeth said: "The world of New England was in that house overlooking the mouth of the George River. Its emotional effect was powerful upon me. I'd go down there by boat early in the morning and stay there all day long. And that is where I painted the first Christina, Wind from the Sea, Seed Corn, and so on. I stayed right within that environment. It was everything. I remember flying over the Olson house when I'd leave late in the fall, and soaring over I would think of Christina sitting in that dry, magical house. Coming in contact with both places, Kuerners and Olsons is simply a natural extension of my life. I didn't plan anything; it just happened."

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After the death of Alvaro and Christina, Wyeth painted one final painting there, End of Olsons. Without the Olsons the place was only an object. But there is a kind of continuation of Olsons, and of Christina in particular, in a group of pictures of a young girl from Maine, Siri Ericson. The most recent of these is a large nude, The Virgin. "To me," Wyeth said, "these pictures of the young Siri are continuations of Olsons, and at the same time they are sharp counteractions to Christina Olson, which symbolized the deterioriation and dwindling of something. Then you get suddenly this change of such an invigorating, zestful, powerful phenomenon. Here was something bursting forth, like spring coming through the ground. In a way The Virgin was not a figure, but more a burst of life."

Wyeth concluded: "Always, I try to go beyond the subject. That's the summation of my art. Emotion is my bulwark. I think that's the only thing that endures, finally. If you are emotionally involved, you're not going to be easily changed. But if it's purely a technical experience that's going to be very short lived. Both technical and emotional have got to be on even terms to be good.

"People often have said to me, 'What's made you keep on against the tide? Supposedly, you're so way behind that you're ahead! Not really. The answer is pure emotion. I was interested in Christina. I was interested in that house. I was fascinated by the Kuerners and the farm. I wasn't at either place to paint a nice group of pictures or bucolic memories, or Maine images. I was emotionally involved in the thing and I just had to get it out of my system. That's all. Art to me is seeing. I think you have got to use your eyes as well as your emotion, and one without the other just doesn't work. That's my art."ti

Installation The installation of the exhibition will be informal in character. The works of art will be hung in chronological groupings beginning with the pictures from Kuerners and following with those from Olsons. A group of paintings from the extensive holdings of Mr. and Mrs. Joseph E. Levine will be exhibited together. The studies lent by the Wyeths, which will be exhibited with the finished temperas, will be hung without mats or frames to emphasize their useful function in the artists's creative process. (At a later date, the studies not included in the exhibition will be shown on a rotating basis throughout the year in another gallery in the Museum.) (MORE) FACT SHEET: TWO WORLDS OF ANDREW WYETH: KUERNERS AND OLSONS PAGE 6

Publications: Two limited edition portfolios and the exhibition catalogue will be published by the Museum. At the mutual suggestion of Mr. Levine and Mr. Wyeth all proceeds from the sale of the catalogue and the two portfolios, exclusive of costs, will be shared equally by the Metropolitan Museum and the New York University Medical Center, an institution in which Mr. Levine has a deep personal interest.

The portfolios, Ten Paintings and Ten Drawings, by Andrew Wyeth have been produced under the supervision of the artist. Each portfolio will be accompanied by an individual certificate, numbered and signed by Andrew Wyeth. Every print will be individually numbered and hand-impressed with the Museum's seal. Each port­ folio will be limited to an edition of 300 copies. 250 copies of each portfolio will be available for purchase.

Number one of the Ten Paintings portfolio was presented to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth and His Royal Highness Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, by the City of Philadelphia on the occasion of their visit to Philadelphia on July 6, 1976.

The Ten Paintings portfolio: Ten Andrew Wyeth paintings in a facsimile collotype. Each print is built up from eight or more color impressions and printed on a specially made paper of archival quality with a watermark including the artist's initials. Pre-publication price for the ten, $2,500 (allowable tax deduction, $1,500).*

The Ten Drawings portfolio: Ten Andrew Wyeth drawings in facsimile collotype. Two or more monochrome impressions are employed to convey the most subtle nuances of the artist's pen and pencil drawings. The facsimiles are printed on a specially made paper of archival quality. Pre-publication price for the ten, $1,850 (allowable tax deduction, $1,250).*

^Allowable Tax Deduction. The portfolios are being issued for the benefit of The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the New York University Medical Center. The income from their sale will be allocated

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equally between the two institutions, and collectors purchasing portfolios will be entitled to tax deductions as noted above.

The exhibition catalogue, Two Worlds of Andrew Wyeth: Kuerners and Olsons, contains conversations bet­ ween the artist and Thomas Hoving, Director of the Metropolitan Museum and organizer of the exhibition. In addition, the catalogue lists the works of art in the exhibition. 192 pages; 95 black-and-white illustra­ tions; 90 plates in full color. Price: $5.95, softcover.

Also on sale will be Wyeth at Kuerners, a major study by Betsy James Wyeth, which will be published by Houghton Mifflin Company in September. 370 paintings, drawings and studies will be reproduced. 336 pages; 10 by 13 inches. $60.00 until January 14, 1977; $75.00 thereafter.

Members' Lectures: Thomas Hoving, Director of the Metropolitan Museum and organizer of the exhibition, will deliver a lecture on the art of Andrew Wyeth to the Museum's members in the Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium on October 19th at 8:00 p„m. He will repeat the lecture on October 26th at 8:00 p.m.

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NOTE: A wide variety of color transparencies and black-and-white prints of works of art in the exhibition are available.

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION and photographs please contact Jack Frizzelle or John Ross, the Public Information Department, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street, New York, N.Y. 10028. Tel: (212) 879-5500. August 1976