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At a press reception held Jan. 16 prior to the opening of the Brandywine River Museum of Art’s major retrospective of Jamie Wyeth’s work, Jamie Wyeth repeatedly expressed his unease at “revisiting his early work.” He said that he knew he “grew from his early work” but that it “doesn’t interest him” to see it now. While he may express such sentiments, those attending the exhibition will find much to fascinate and engage them as they follow his development as an artist. The exciting exhibition on the walls of the Brandywine galleries which have been painted in handsome hues of burgundy and maroon to complement the paintings, examines his distinctive approach to realism over the course of six decades, from his earliest portraits to the present. Landscapes of the Brandywine Valley and coastal Maine, family members and fellow artists (including the engaging portrait of Andy Warhol painted in 1976, whom he described as “very childlike”), are shown as well as domesticated and wild animals, many executed in “combined mediums,” the term he uses to describe his technique.

On December 22, American Legends: From Calder to O’Keeffe opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. The exhibition features works by defining artists of the first half of the twentieth century including Charles Burchfield (1893-1967), Alexander Calder (1898-1976), Stuart Davis (1892-1964), Arthur Dove (1880-1946), Marsden Hartley (1877-1943) , Edward Hopper (1882-1967), Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986), and Elie Nadelman (1880-1946).

Drawing from the Whitney’s impressive permanent collection, the yearlong show is organized into small-scale retrospectives for each artist and includes iconic and lesser-known works across a range of mediums. While, many of the works have not been on view in years, the show also includes some of the Whitney’s best-known holdings including Edward Hopper’s A Woman in the Sun (1961), Jacob Lawrence’s War Series 1946), and Georgia O’Keeffe’s Summer Days (1936).  

Curated by Barbara Haskell, the exhibition will undergo a rotation in May 2013 so that other artists’ works can be installed. Including realist and modernist masterpieces, American Legends illustrates the dynamic and varied nature of American art during the early twentieth century.