Young America

Additional Information Andrew Wyeth is one of the best-known American artists of the twentieth century.  He studied with his father, the famous illustrator N. C. Wyeth. The elder Wyeth taught his son that depicting mood through the subtleties of changing light and shadow was the ultimate goal of art.  Because Andrew Wyeth remained committed to a realist manner during the heyday of Abstract Expressionism, many prominent modernist art critics considered him old-fashioned and out-of-touch. Despite that view, several of Wyeth’s contemporaries, including Willem De Kooning and Mark Rothko, recognized a dark psychological undercurrent in Wyeth’s best work and a tendency to compose with miniaturized calligraphic gestures that parallel those of Mark Tobey. Many of his best-known paintings present isolated figures before deep moody spaces that form great, sometimes overwhelming expanses of air and void. Wyeth’s paintings often suggest quietude, isolation, and provoke contemplation; there are few pretty or easy pictures in his oeuvre. Wyeth formed close relationships with his models, including the bicyclist shown in Young America. The boy was a neighbor of the Wyeth family and a friend of Wyeth’s children.