Despite (or perhaps because of) the bleakness of much of his work, Wyeth became something of a celebrity following the sale of Christina's World, and he enjoyed widespread popularity through the heyday of Abstract Expressionism in the 1950s. Admiring their simplicity and tenacity, Wyeth celebrated them in numerous well-known canvases, including the iconic Christina's World, purchased by the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1949. In the years after World War II, the artist focused much of his attention on two families, the Kuerners in Pennsylvania and the Olsons in Maine. Following the untimely death of his father at a railroad crossing in 1945, Wyeth began to infuse his work with a somber and enigmatic quality that has persisted throughout his career. Both his watercolors and temperas attracted attention from the start, and from the time of his first New York show at age twenty-two, Wyeth has remained in the forefront of contemporary Realist painting. Not long afterward, Wyeth began to paint in the traditional medium of egg tempera, creating works of exacting verisimilitude. He studied drawing and painting under his father, and, inspired by the watercolors of Winslow Homer (q.v.), he developed an early realist style akin to that of the nineteenth-century master. The son of illustrator and painter Newell Convers Wyeth (1882-1945), the artist was born in 1917 in Chadd's Ford, Pennsylvania. Long esteemed for his extraordinary Realist vision and straightforward subject matter, Andrew Wyeth is arguably the most popular living painter in the United States.
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