Wyeth's Hupper's Point

As noted over the long weekend, American painter Andrew Wyeth died Friday.

The New York Times article on Wyeth had this bit:

A minority opinion within the art world always tried to reconcile Wyeth with mainstream modernism. It was occasionally argued, among other things, that his work had an abstract component and was linked to the gestural style of artists like Kline, de Kooning and Pollock, for whom Wyeth expressed general disdain. It is true that especially some of the early watercolors of the 30’s and 40’s, in a looser style, inclined toward abstraction.

A watercolor in the collection of our museum serves as one example of the "gestural style" found in Wyeth's 1930s and 1940s images. Hupper’s Point, painted plein air in Maine, verges on the abstract, thus revealing an underlying tendency present in many of Andrew Wyeth’s works from the era. A landscape view of the tidal pools along a rocky coastline dissolves into bold compositional forms of grays and purples and browns. Purchased as a contemporary work of art by the Georgia Museum of Art's founder, Alfred Holbrook, Hupper's Point remains a prized object in the collection of the state's official art museum.

Image: Andrew Wyeth (American, 1917-2009), Hupper’s Point, 1944. Watercolor on paper, 21 x 29 inches. Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia; Eva Underhill Holbrook Memorial Collection of American Art, gift of Alfred H. Holbrook. GMOA 1946.116