His Final Brush With Death

(Props to Nancy)

Or
Tempera-rary
Andrew Wyeth, who confounded critics and delighted the masses with pictures of things people know rather than splotches, miscolored tomato cans, melting clocks and feces-smeared canvases, has died at the age of 91. Wyeth’s America was largely bleak – gray and brown vistas, strange old houses, barren hills, abandoned barns, bare-limbed trees, and empty beaches – but was viewed as stolidly middle class, an immediate turn-off for the intelligentsia. Some criticized him as romanticizing a long-past America, as though one’s past is something to be forgotten or that cripples crawling through fields is romantic. With this latter work, Christina’s World, Wyeth’s fame exploded – Winston Churchill requested Wyeth watercolors to decorate his room, Harvard gave him an honorary degree, in 1963 President Johnson gave him the Presidential Medal of Freedom and Mister Rogers hung a Wyeth in the entry way of his studio house.