MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
One of this country's best known artists has died. Andrew Wyeth passed away in his sleep in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. He painted iconic images of rural America, realistic but imbued with hidden meaning. And he drew inspiration from the places he spent his entire life - Chadds Ford and Maine. NPR's Lynn Neary has this remembrance.
LYNN NEARY: When you hear Andrew Wyeth talk about painting, there's an excitement in his voice that belies the sense of melancholy that seems to permeate some of his best known paintings. In this 1995 NPR interview, Wyeth, then in his late 70s, described his own artistic process.
(SOUNDBITE OF NPR INTERVIEW, 1995)
ANDREW WYETH: It's an enlightening, it's a flash. And then, after you have that flash, of course, comes the hard work of finally pulling it together and putting it down with as great simplicity as you can.
NEARY: Andrew Wyeth was a sickly child who was home-schooled and had lots of time to play imaginary games and wander in the countryside. Wyeth biographer Richard Meryman says, that sense of childhood wonder never left him.
RICHARD MERYMAN: I think to understand Wyeth is to understand that in that body is a 10-year-old boy and at the same time, the body is occupied by an intensely serious artist.
NEARY: The son of the well-known illustrator N.C. Wyeth, Andrew Wyeth began his artistic training under his father's tutelage. It was after his father's death in 1945 that Wyeth really came into his own as an artist. Kathleen Foster is the curator of American art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which had an exhibition of Wyeth's work in 2006. She says, he was more vulnerable, but also more serious, after his father's death.
KATHLEEN FOSTER: His work got deeper, his themes became more profound, and in many cases became much darker.
NEARY: In pictures like "Trodden Weed," "Geraniums," "Groundhog Day" and perhaps most famously, in "Christina's World," Wyeth painted the people, landscapes and buildings near his homes in Pennsylvania and Maine. Well-liked by the public, Wyeth's paintings were dismissed by some art critics as too sentimental and mere illustrations. In 1986, when his "Helga" paintings - more than 200 sketches and paintings of the same woman - were revealed, he was even accused of staging a media event. But Foster says, his critics should look again. He wasn't just a realist; he was a magic-realist.
FOSTER: His pictures are just shot through with memory and fantasy, with every storybook that he has read. And they come out - it comes out in the magic of the image, because his pictures are fascinating. You want to come back and look at them again.
NEARY: Wyeth's life was organized around and energized by his need to paint. Biographer Richard Meryman says, painting was probably the one thing that Andrew Wyeth could not live without.
MERYMAN: I always thought that the day he could no longer paint, he would die. And in a sense, this is what's happened. I wouldn't doubt at all that he was ready to go.
NEARY: Artist Andrew Wyeth died last night in his sleep. He was 91 years old. Lynn Neary, NPR News, Washington.
NORRIS: You can see a gallery of Andrew Wyeth's paintings at npr.org.