An extraordinary private collection of watercolors and drawings by Andrew Wyeth depicting the subjects memorialized in his legendary painting Christina's World, one of the best-known works of American art. This book presents rarely seen watercolors and drawings Andrew Wyeth made of his friend Christina Olson, her brother Alvaro, and the weathered Maine farmstead where they lived. It features moving portraits and serene interior and exterior views of the house and the surrounding land, now memorialized in Wyeth's 1948 tempera painting Christina's World, one of the most famous paintings in the history of American art and now in the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Some forty-five works from the collection of the Marunuma Art Park in Japan, rarely shown before in the United States, are accompanied by works from the Farnsworth as well as by historical photographs of Wyeth, the Olsons, and the house. Otoyo Nakamura writes about the history of this collection of Wyeth works, and Michael Komanecky addresses the place of the Olson farm in Wyeth's career over three decades, and how Christina's World and the Olson House have inspired pilgrimages for fans of Wyeth's work. Despite its isolated location and seasonal schedule, Olson House draws thousands of visitors each year from around the world. The Olson House, acquired by the Farnsworth Art Museum in 1991, has been recommended for National Landmark status.

In 1948 Andrew Wyeth produced what would become one of the most iconic paintings in American art: a desolate landscape featuring a woman lying in a field, that he called "Christina's World." The woman in the painting, Christina Olson, lived in Cushing, Maine, where Wyeth and his wife kept a summer house. She suffered from polio, and was paralyzed from the waist down; Wyeth was moved to portray her when he saw her one day crawling through the field towards her house. "Christina's World" was to become one of the most well-loved and most scorned works of the twentieth century, igniting heated arguments about parochialism, sentimentality, kitsch and elitism that have continued to dog the art world and Wyeth's own reputation, even after the artist's death in 2009. An essay by MoMA curator Laura Hoptman revisits the genesis of the painting, discussing Wyeth's curious focus, over the course of his career, on a deliberately delimited range of subjects and exploring the mystery that continues to surround the enigmatic painting.

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER "A must-read for anyone who loves history and art.” --Kristin Hannah From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the smash bestseller Orphan Train, a stunning and atmospheric novel of friendship, passion, and art, inspired by Andrew Wyeth’s mysterious and iconic painting Christina’s World. "Later he told me that he’d been afraid to show me the painting. He thought I wouldn’t like the way he portrayed me: dragging myself across the field, fingers clutching dirt, my legs twisted behind. The arid moonscape of wheatgrass and timothy. That dilapidated house in the distance, looming up like a secret that won’t stay hidden." To Christina Olson, the entire world was her family’s remote farm in the small coastal town of Cushing, Maine. Born in the home her family had lived in for generations, and increasingly incapacitated by illness, Christina seemed destined for a small life. Instead, for more than twenty years, she was host and inspiration for the artist Andrew Wyeth, and became the subject of one of the best known American paintings of the twentieth century. As she did in her beloved smash bestseller Orphan Train, Christina Baker Kline interweaves fact and fiction in a powerful novel that illuminates a little-known part of America’s history. Bringing into focus the flesh-and-blood woman behind the portrait, she vividly imagines the life of a woman with a complicated relationship to her family and her past, and a special bond with one of our greatest modern artists. Told in evocative and lucid prose, A Piece of the World is a story about the burdens and blessings of family history, and how artist and muse can come together to forge a new and timeless legacy.

This album of photographs, watercolor sketches, watercolor paintings, and finished tempera paintings, accompanied by a revealing personal text, explores the world of Christina Olson, the subject of Wyeth's most famous paintings

N. C. Wyeth was one of America's greatest illustrators and the founder of a dynasty of artists that continues to enrich the American scene. This collection of letters, written from his eighteenth year to his tragic death at sixty-one, constitutes in effect his intimate autobiography, and traces and development and flowering of the "Wyeth tradition" over the course of several generations. -- Amazon.com.

An insightful and essential new survey of Wyeth's entire career, situating the milestones of his art within the trajectory of 20th-century American life This major retrospective catalogue explores the impact of time and place on the work of beloved American painter Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009). While previous publications have mainly analyzed Wyeth's work thematically, this publication places him fully in the context of the long 20th century, tracing his creative development from World War I through the new millennium. Published to coincide with the centenary of Wyeth's birth, the book looks at four major chronological periods in the artist's career: Wyeth as a product of the interwar years, when he started to form his own "war memories" through military props and documentary photography he discovered in his father's art studio; the change from his "theatrical" pictures of the 1940s to his own visceral responses to the landscape around Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, and his family's home in Mai≠ his sudden turn, in 1968, into the realm of erotic art, including a completely new assessment of Wyeth's "Helga pictures"--a series of secret, nude depictions of his neighbor Helga Testorf--within his career as a who≤ and his late, self-reflective works, which includes the discussion of his previously unknown painting entitled Goodbye, now believed to be Wyeth's last work.

This engaging biography looks beyond the famous Andrew Wyeth painting at the woman whose dignity and spirit left a lasting impression on those she touched.

"A revelation. No one will ever view Andrew Wyeth's apparently tranquil works the same way again after reading this vivid and astonishing portrait of the turbulent, driven man who paints them. Richard Meryman has written a wonderful book." - Geoffrey C. Ward At its most fundamental level, this stunning and unique biography describes a distinguished painter's enterprise of transmitting emotion onto a flat surface. It explores all the factors that have combined to create Andrew Wyeth -- his childhood in a hothouse of creativity; his hypersensitivity; his formidable wife; his identification with people marginalized and misunderstood -- all which have made him an American icon. In the process, his realist works in watercolor and tempera, including the famous "Christina's World," have gained him a special and secure niche in the history of American art. The book is a portrait of obsession -- how single-mindedness has affected Wyeth's relationships and transformed his world into a realm of secrecy and fervid imagination. Those who read this book will never look at Wyeth's work as they did before. It reveals the artist's dark depths, as well as the ruthless, angry, child/man fantasist who paints the basic brutalities of existence -- death and madness --that vibrate eerily beneath his pictures' calm surfaces. Richard Meryman's narrative is almost novelistic, with its larger-than-life characters and subplots: the tragedy of C.C. Wyeth; Betsy Wyeth's campaign for independence and individuality; the byzantine 15-year-long drama of the Helga paintings; the eccentric and creative Wyeth clan; and the idiosyncratic land and people of Maine and Pennsylvania. Based on 30 years of research, frequent visits and countless conversations with the artist, his family, friends, admirers and critics, Andrew Wyeth: A Secret Life is the only book about the man and the artist that gets behind his carefully guarded screen, tells the full story of his life and reveals his complex personality and the motivations for his paintings.

One of Andrew Wyeth's most important paintings, Wind from the Sea, a recent gift to the National Gallery of Art, is also the artist's first full realization of the window as a recurring subject in his art. Wyeth returned to windows over the next sixty years, producing more than 250 works that explore both the formal and conceptual richness of the subject. Spare, elegant and abstract, these paintings are free of the narrative element inevitably associated with Wyeth's better-known figural compositions. In 2014 the Gallery will present an exhibition of a select group of these deceptively 'realistic' works, window paintings that are in truth skilfully manipulated constructions engaged with the visual complexities posed by the transparency, beauty and formal structure of windows. In its exclusive focus on paintings without human subjects, this catalogue will offer a new approach to Wyeth's work, being the first time that his non-figural compositions have been published as a group. The authors explore Wyeth's fascination with windows - their formal structure and metaphorical complexity. In essays that address links with the poetry of Robert Frost and the paintings of Edward Hopper, Charles Sheeler and Franz Kline, the authors consider Wyeth's statement that he was, in truth, an 'abstract' painter.

The Museum of Modern Art is known for its prescient focus on the avant-garde art of Europe, but in the first half of the twentieth century it was also acquiring work by Stuart Davis, Georgia O’Keeffe, Charles Sheeler, Alfred Stieglitz, and other, less well-known American artists whose work sometimes fits awkwardly under the avant garde umbrella. American Modern presents a fresh look at MoMA’s holdings of American art from that period. The still lifes, portraits, and urban, rural, and industrial landscapes vary in style, approach, and medium: melancholy images by Edward Hopper and Andrew Wyeth bump against the eccentric landscapes of Charles Burchfield and the Jazz Age sculpture of Elie Nadelman. Yet a distinct sensibility emerges, revealing a side of the Museum that may surprise a good part of its audience and throwing light on the cultural preoccupations of the rapidly changing American society of the day.