Rockland museum teams with partners to exhibit unseen Andrew Wyeth art
Courtesy / Farnsworth Art Museum
The Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, a Pennsylvania museum and the Wyeth Foundation for American Art will share 7,000 works by American painter Andrew Wyeth.
Nearly 6,000 unseen works of art by renowned Maine painter Andrew Wyeth will be conserved and exhibited by the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland and two partners.
A total of 7,000 works by Wyeth will be shared in a partnership of the Farnsworth, the Brandywine River Museum of Art in Chadds Ford, Pa., and the Wyeth Foundation for American Art, in Wilmington, Del. Only about 15% of the pieces have ever been viewed publicly.
Wyeth was born in Chadds Ford in 1917 and divided his time between there and midcoast Maine, where he painted from the late 1920s through 2008.
The three-way partnership was set up by Wyeth and his wife and business manager, Betsy, in 2002. Wyeth died in 2009, and the agreement became effective upon Betsy’s death in 2020. The Wyeth Foundation owns all of the work, but the museums care for and curate the art.
“It’s an incredibly exciting time here. This formalizes a relationship that provides access to 7,000 works of art, in perpetuity. We get to share that with the public,” Farnsworth Director Chris Brownawell told Mainebiz.
“Our ‘Early Temperas’ and ‘Islands in Maine’ exhibits are already an example of this gift,” Brownawell said, referring to two current exhibits of Wyeth’s work in Rockland.
The Wyeth Foundation also is funding a new position at the Brandywine for a curator who will guide the collection, facilitate loans to other museums, and coordinate between the Pennsylvania and Maine museums. The curator also will create the catalogue raisonné, or comprehensive, annotated listing of all Wyeth’s known works.
Brownawell said he’d love to see some traveling exhibits periodically to allow other institutions to share the art.
“This collection could easily have been sold off, unseen, but it wasn’t. It’s a remarkably generous gift that, in some cases, we’re seeing many pieces of for the first time,” Brownawell said.
“It’s incredibly important that the work is shared in perpetuity and people have the opportunity to see not just the final pieces, but the studies, the notebooks — it’s a treasure trove,” Brownawell said. “It’s also an opportunity to recontextualize Andrew’s work along with other important American art.”
The Farnsworth typically attracts about 70,000 visitors a year and has an annual budget of $4.5 million.
Most Recent
Most Recent
0 Comments