The Brandywine River Museum in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, by virtue of its gorgeous countryside location, is worlds apart from the typical urban setting where we expect to find a fine arts museum. It exists in an almost make-believe part of America made famous by the Wyeth family of artists for the last three generations.
Currently, unless you live within striking distance, they have an exhibition you wish you could see, and that every art student in the country should see.
Through November 19, 2006, Factory Work: Warhol, Wyeth and Basquiat, is an eye-opening exhibition that should (at the very least) cement firmly the artistic footprint of the youngest of the two active Wyeth artists: Jamie Wyeth. It also involves two of the last century's great art icons.
Jamie Wyeth (born 1946) and Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988) were both young, successful artists with substantial reputations of their own, when Andy Warhol invited them (Wyeth in the 70s and Basquiat in the 80s) to join him in New York and paint with Warhol at the Factory, Warhol’s famous New York studio.
"Wyeth and Warhol?" the editors of most American Art History books should ask.
Jamie Wyeth is the son of realist painter and American art icon Andrew Wyeth, and the grandson of illustrator N.C. Wyeth (and all three of the Wyeths share other salons in the museum). While Andrew Wyeth and his father are well-known names in the iconography of American art, Jamie has somewhat been dismissed unfairly by the postmodernists and the usual town criers always screaming about the "death of painting." Jamie Wyeth, above it all, is a painter in the most powerful and solid of all painting traditions.
The current exhibition at the Brandywine River Museum showcases and documents the results of Wyeth’s long and fruitful association with Warhol and also Warhol’s subsequent and similar association with Basquiat.
The Wyeth-Warhol relationship was a close one. The two shopped for antiques and taxidermy specimens together, attended art exhibition and gallery openings, and exchanged ideas and traded influences. Warhol also visited Wyeth's farm in Chadds Ford, several times and in fact documented one of these visits in his published diaries.
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1 - diana hartman
I am pleased to tell you this article is being featured in the Culture Focus today, October 6th.
Diana Hartman
Culture Editor