Oct. 19 marks the opening of “Andrew Wyeth: In Retrospective” at the Seattle Art Museum. Organized to coincide with the 100th anniversary of Wyeth’s birth, the exhibition presents 110 paintings and drawings produced between the late 1930s and 2008. The presentation includes rarely seen works from the Wyeth family’s private holdings alongside museum loans, offering a broad view of the artist’s long career.
The galleries are arranged to highlight recurring subjects and the evolution of Wyeth’s practice. Early rooms focus on familiar figures such as Christina Olson of Maine and Karl Kuerner, Wyeth’s neighbor in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. From those thematic beginnings the show moves through a loose chronology: early watercolors, the staged compositions of the 1940s and 1950s, and later technical experiments from the 1950s and 1960s.
Also exhibited are Wyeth’s ventures into abstraction, exemplified by the 1969 painting “Thin Ice.” Owned privately in Japan, that canvas appears on the U.S. West Coast for the first time as part of this retrospective. Visitors will also encounter the famously private Helga series—numerous nude portraits of Helga Testorf painted in secret over many years—and Wyeth’s final canvas, “Goodbye” (2008), which has not been publicly shown since it appeared at the artist’s memorial in 2009.
The exhibition includes supplementary material that deepens context, such as a filmed conversation between Andrew Wyeth and director King Vidor, offering insight into the artist’s perspectives on his work. “Andrew Wyeth: In Retrospective” runs through Jan. 15, 2018, providing an extended opportunity to see a comprehensive selection of one of America’s most discussed realist painters.