02 Works, The art of War, Andrew Wyeth and Birds of War, with footnotes

Andrew Wyeth (1917–2009)

Soaring, c. 1942-1950

Tempera on Masonite

48 x 87 inches

Shelburne Museum

In Soaring, begun in 1942, Wyeth took to the sky to adopt a bird’s-eye view of his surrounding landscape. In this large-scale painting, the viewer hovers with three turkey vultures above a lone house and barn isolated in a vast, empty landscape. The largest vulture, suspended just below the posited viewer, spreads its wings to span almost the entire width of the painting. It appears as a dark form outlined against the fallow winter fields below. The two other raptors that circle below, closing in on the farm, indicate the yawning distance between the viewer and the ground. 

Wyeth implicitly presents this vision as avian and not human, exploring the divergence between the human and the animal much like Foster would later do. Although the viewer may adopt the vulture’s perspective in Soaring, able to discern the little white farmhouse embedded in the landscape below, she cannot see or smell the carrion that the circling birds obviously do. After all, the turkey buzzard feeds primarily on the dead flesh of animals owing to its keen senses of vision and smell that humans simply lack.  More on this painting

Andrew Wyeth (1917–2009)

Thurkey Buzzard Soaring (verso), ca. 1942

Graphite pencil on paper

19⅜ x 29 inches

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Andrew Newell Wyeth (July 12, 1917 – January 16, 2009) was an American visual artist, primarily a realist painter, working predominantly in a regionalist style. He believed he was also an abstractionist, portraying subjects in a new, meaningful way. Raised with an appreciation of nature, Wyeth took walks that fired his imagination. Henry David Thoreau, Robert Frost, and King Vidor's The Big Parade (1925) inspired him intellectually and artistically. 

His father, N. C., gave him art lessons as a child, during which he developed the skills to create landscapes, illustrations, works of figures, and watercolor paintings. His brother-in-law, Peter Hurd, taught him to use egg tempera. 

In his art, Wyeth's favorite subjects were the land and people around him, both in his hometown of Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania and at his summer home in Cushing, Maine. He made a collection of about 300 paintings of windows which were presented in the National Gallery of Art's 2014 exhibition, "Andrew Wyeth: Looking Out, Looking In". In the 1960s, he began to paint portraits of family members, friends, and neighbors. Wyeth often said: "I paint my life."

Summarizing the variation of opinions about his work, art historian Robert Rosenblum said that Wyeth was the "most overrated and underrated" artist. He was known for his skill at creating watercolor and tempera paintings that engage one's senses and emotions. Christina's World became an iconic image, a status unmet by even the best paintings, "that registers as an emotional and cultural reference point in the minds of millions." Among the awards and honors that he received since 1947 are the Presidential Medal of Freedom and Congressional Gold Medals and he was elected to Britain's Royal Academy. More on Andrew Newell Wyeth

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