Andrew Wyeth

When other mid-20th century artists were drawn toward abstraction, Andrew Wyeth continued his exploration of domestic realism, painting both interiors and exteriors of the farm and industrial buildings of the Pennsylvania countryside, and, in the summers, the clapboard houses and stark landscape of the Maine coast. After his father N.C. Wyeth died in a 1945 car accident, he began to incorporate images of people into his paintings, most famously his neighbor Helga Testorf. Rendered in egg tempera, Wyeth's keenly observed images have a pared down sparseness that gives them a palpable sense of quiet. Wyeth was the first visual artist to appear on the cover of Time magazine and the first living American-born artist to have a show at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.