“Bread crumbs”(perhaps how you got here)

(Originally posted January 16th, 2009)

The painting is Long Limb by Andrew Wyeth, whose passing is reported today.

Andrew Wyeth has been, for many years, one of the most popular contemporary painters; his work was characterized by extreme realism and a strong tendency to emphasize loneliness and solitude. Long Limb is a typical example.

Wyeth's work is almost the exact opposite of abstract expressionism, a form that was directly associated with broader modernist ideologies. On the other hand, it is, at least at first glance, not fair to characterize Wyeth's paintings as "post-modern;" a truly post-modern painting would be fragmented or would overtly be a fragment of a whole that has no meaning.

I must confess that I am no great fan of Wyeth; I have always thought that his work is repetitive in its continual emphasis on superficial realism and a single theme, alienation. The example given here is annoyingly atypical in that it does not show a human figure; Wyeth's treatment of human models and figures is interesting, but not overwhelming. It seems to me that the path of extreme realism (perhaps to be called "neo-realism") makes painting little more than a branch of photography. The work shown above could have been produced by a good photographer.

In preparing this page, I naturally visited the Andrew Wyeth Web site. There one can find several examples of better works than the one above; however, copying of the images is disabled, which makes it difficult to cite and discuss most of the artist's work. Because of the copyright laws, his work will remain copyrighted for many years to come; we can expect the continuation of the restriction of access. Evidently the trustees or administrators of Wyeth's work have thought more highly of the possibility of making money from restriction than they have of trying to spread his work. There are many other artists who have similarly restricted access to their art. Thomas Kinkaid, whose work is probably more popular than Wyeth's, also restricts on-line access (see The Official Thomas Kinkade Website), although the restriction is somewhat weaker than in Wyeth's case. The Web site of another still-popular artist, Ted DeGrazia, seems to show nothing at all on line.

 All text on this page is the work of J W Durham and is licensed only under terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Other licensing terms may be available. E-mail me