Author(s): Elliot Bostwick Davis

Art

As famous, and sometimes famously controversial, as the three generations of Wyeth artists have been, the artistic vision of Jamie Wyeth considered separate from the context of his family remains surprisingly little known. This retrospective, the first in more than thirty years, presents a full range of work from his earliest, virtuoso portraits to his most current mysteriously symbolic seascapes. Jamie Wyeth's early training in his father Andrew Wyeth's studio, his youthful immersion in Andy Warhol's Factory and the New York art scene of the 1970s, and his continuing dialogue with artists past and present combine with his artistic imagination to create an elusive, hybrid form of realism that ranges from sharply observed portraits of historical and cultural figures, to personified animals and animated landscapes, to a vision of an inferno set on Maines Monhegan Island. By exploring the themes and subjects central to Jamie Wyeth's vision, the authors place him in the context of his own distinguished artistic heritage as well as the long tradition of American realist painting and its contemporary revival.
The more than one hundred paintings, works on paper and multimedia assemblages lavishly reproduced in this book invite us to explore the world of a prodigiously gifted, adamantly individualist American artist.