Andrew Wyeth is probably America's best-known living artist. His paintings are enormously popular but his achievement is controversial. Over his long career, he has mostly stood apart--sporadically celebrated, often taken for granted, sometimes ignored, seldom studied in depth. It has been more than three decades since Wyeth's huge body of work has received concentrated scholarly attention. As the artist approaches his ninth decade, it is time to consider this master's work anew.

Andrew Wyeth: Memory Magic looks at the sweep of Wyeth's entire career, seeking patterns, echoes,elaborations, shifts, epiphanies. John Wilmerding considers Wyeth within the American realist tradition of Eakins, Homer, and Hopper. Michael R. Taylor takes a fresh look at Wyeth's early career and finds an artist less impervious to influence than previously believed.Anne Classen Knutson studies Wyeth's relationship to things, the symbolism of places and objects, and scenes that Wyeth has painted over and over for decades.Kathleen Foster seeks the meaning of a single work,Groundhog Day, tracking through different media--scores of preparatory drawings and watercolors--the development and obsessive revision of the idea.Christopher Crosman writes of the artist's wife (and muse, manager, and model), Betsy James Wyeth, and reveals a key actor in Wyeth's career.  More than 150 Wyeth paintings, watercolors, and drawings are illustrated in Andrew Wyeth: Memory Magic. This book is published in association with a major exhibition organized by the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Directors'Foreword

Acknowledgments

Introduction

John Wilmerding

Between Realism and Surrealism:

The Early Work of Andrew Wyeth

Michael R. Taylor

Andrew Wyeth's Language of Things

Anne Classen Knutson

Meaning and Medium in Wyeth's Art:

Revisiting Groundhog Day

Kathleen A. Foster

Betsy's World

Christopher Crosman

Plates

Checklist of the Exhibition

Lenders to the Exhibition

Index