There was a time, not so long ago, when the idea that Andrew Wyeth’s reputation might recover among critics and art historians seemed unlikely. By the 1960s and ’70s, the high tide of abstract expressionism in America, his status as a realist master of austere portraits and haunted landscapes was replaced by the consensus that his paintings were formulaic illustrations for mass consumption, designed to appeal to rich collectors.
To be sure, there was a kernel of truth in the criticism. Wyeth was the son of N.C. Wyeth, one of the great illustrators of the early 20th century, and had a sharp commercial sense. Andrew spent his long artistic lifetime repeatedly depicting his native habitats of Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, and the southeast coast of Maine, far from the salons and galleries of New York. Worst of all, his paintings — magic realism mixed with surreal elements and abstraction — were always popular, sometimes spectacularly so, with the general public. And yet, by the time of his death in 2009, Wyeth’s reputation as a modern master, respected as well as beloved, had been restored.
Part of the reason is that Wyeth really was a great artist. But the other part is that his long career was sustained, as well as largely supported and directed, by his wife of seven decades, Betsy Wyeth, who died last week at age 98 in Chadds Ford. Betsy Wyeth was Andrew Wyeth’s artistic muse and partner, as well as his shrewd manager: The commercial success that so disturbed art critics owed something to her guidance, her subtle and persistent influence on her husband’s work, and her organizational and financial skills.
This is all the more impressive given the facts of her life before she met her future husband in 1939. The daughter of a Buffalo newspaper editor who owned a vacation home in Maine, Betsy Wyeth (then Betsy James) had no formal art training when, at age 17, her father introduced her to 20-year-old Andrew Wyeth, whose family’s summer residence was nearby.
Andrew Wyeth was already an artist of repute — he had sold every painting at his first New York gallery show two years earlier — but their meeting would prove decisive. She introduced him to a local brother and sister, Alvaro and Christina Olson, who inhabited a squalid farmhouse at the crest of a barren hill. Betsy was curious to observe Andrew’s reaction to the impoverished and slightly forbidding pair she had befriended. Alvaro Olson barely managed to subsist as a farmer, and Christina Olson was paralyzed from the waist down but disdained the use of a wheelchair. Andrew Wyeth seemed to have passed the test: They were married in 1940.
In subsequent years, Andrew Wyeth would depict the Olsons in innumerable works. But his mysterious egg-tempera vision of Christina Olson crawling up the hill toward her farmhouse was not only modeled by but was also titled by Betsy, Christina’s World (1948). It was purchased the following year by the Museum of Modern Art. It remains Andrew Wyeth’s best-known and probably most admired work.
In that sense, the partnership of Andrew and Betsy Wyeth was a practical as well as artistic arrangement. It was Betsy Wyeth who persuaded Andrew Wyeth to follow his instincts by resisting his illustrator father’s professional advice. And it was Betsy Wyeth whose counsel and domestic competence, raising two sons, paying bills and taxes, organizing shows, compiling catalogs, that freed her husband to flourish as an artist.
The lone crisis, if it was one, in their long collaboration was played out in public. In 1985, Andrew revealed that, during the previous 15 years, he had secretly produced and concealed a series of paintings, including several nude studies, of a young German-born nurse neighbor named Helga Testorf. The news became a media sensation, the “Helga” paintings were unveiled in a blockbuster show at Washington’s National Gallery of Art, and the backstory suggested trouble in the Wyeth marriage.
Betsy Wyeth responded in characteristic fashion. When asked what had inspired her husband’s behavior, she replied, “Love” — and then patiently organized the exhibition catalog.
Philip Terzian is the author of Architects of Power: Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and the American Century.
