Jan. 16 (Bloomberg) -- Andrew Wyeth, the U.S. realist painter whose haunting portrait of a young woman lying in a field and gazing at a distant farmhouse became one of the iconic images of 20th-century American art, has died. He was 91.

Wyeth died early today in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, after a brief illness, said Hillary Holland, a spokeswoman for the town’s Brandywine River Museum, which showcases Wyeth’s work. He was born in Chadds Ford and spent summers in Cushing, Maine. Both places figured prominently in his work.

Wyeth was America’s most-acclaimed living artist. His watercolor and egg tempera paintings have been featured in museum exhibitions from Paris to Tokyo since his debut one-man show in New York in 1937. He was the first artist to win the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the first to have a solo show at the White House and the first living artist to receive a retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

His most famous work, “Christina’s World” (1948), depicts his Maine neighbor, who was unable to walk, in a pink dress stretched out in a blueberry field, looking longingly up a hill toward a house and barn. The yearning conveyed by the subject, whose face isn’t shown, struck a nerve with post-World War II America, and now rivals Grant Wood’s “American Gothic” (1930) as perhaps the most reproduced painting in U.S. history.

“There’s this sense of anguish that comes through that we can all identify with, of feeling immobilized at some point in our lives, trying to reach something beyond our grasp,” said Amber Lucero-Criswell, associate curator of education for the Cincinnati Art Museum, which held a Wyeth exhibition in 2007.

‘Helga Pictures’

The son of renowned book illustrator N.C. Wyeth, Andrew Wyeth eschewed the abstract expressionism that prevailed beginning in the 1940s, as practiced by contemporaries such as Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock. Art critics were divided about him. Some dismissed him as a banal illustrator whose immense popularity was undeserved, while others saw a genius whose paintings of stoves, trees and birds functioned as powerful symbols of loneliness, death and decay.

In 1986, almost a half century after his first show, Wyeth caused a sensation in the art world with the release of a previously secret cache of 240 portraits, many of them nudes, that became known as the “Helga Pictures.” In 1971, Helga Testorf, then 32, began posing for Wyeth in his farmhouse studio in Chadds Ford. Both Wyeth’s wife, Betsy, and Testorf’s husband were kept in the dark about the 15-year project.

Fending Off Questions

As recently as two years ago, Wyeth, who was famously media- shy, was still fending off questions about the exact nature of his clandestine relationship with Helga Testorf.

“When people want to bring sex into these images, OK, let them,” Wyeth said in the catalog for a December 2006 exhibit at the Adelson Galleries in New York. “The heart of the Helga series is that I was trying to unlock my emotions in capturing her essence, in getting her humanity down.”

Andrew Newell Wyeth was born in the farming village of Chadds Ford some 25 miles southwest of Philadelphia on July 12, 1917, the youngest of five children of Newell Convers Wyeth and Carolyn Brenneman Wyeth. His father was a mural painter and illustrator of “Treasure Island,” “Robin Hood” and other children’s classics.

Andrew had a lot of free time because a sinus condition kept him out of school, requiring him to be tutored privately. The elder Wyeth taught his son how to draw and paint.

‘Played Alone’

“I played alone, and wandered a great deal over the hills, painting watercolors that literally exploded, slapdash over my pages, and drew in pencil or pen and ink in a wild and undisciplined manner,” Wyeth told Thomas Hoving, the former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, for a 1976-77 exhibition catalog.

The Wyeth family usually spent summers in New England, at first in Needham, Massachusetts, and later in Maine. His watercolor landscapes and seascapes of Maine, somewhat reminiscent of Winslow Homer (1836-1910), made up the bulk of his first one-man show at the William Macbeth Gallery in New York in October 1937, according to a Wyeth biography written by his primary dealer, Frank Fowler of Lookout Mountain, Tennessee.

In the 1940s Wyeth began working in egg tempera, a type of paint made with yolk, a technique he learned from his brother-in- law, the painter Peter Hurd. The medium, combined with the dry- brush method he used, forced Wyeth to slow his execution and enabled him to achieve the subdued palette that distinguished his work. In 1943, he exhibited his temperas at Macbeth and in the Museum of Modern Art’s “American Realists and Magic Realists” show in New York.

Father’s Death

The turning point in Wyeth’s life came in October 1945 when his father was killed after his car was hit by a train at a rail crossing in Chadds Ford.

“When he died, I was just a clever watercolorist -- lots of swish and swash,” Wyeth said in an interview with Life magazine in 1965. He decided “to do something serious” with his talent.

“I had always had this great motion toward the landscape, and so with his death, the landscape took on a meaning -- the quality of him,” he said.

Wyeth began to imbue his paintings with metaphors. The imposing hill a boy runs down in “Winter 1946,” for example, represents his deceased father.

“The loneliness and emptiness of this hillside thus came to express the artist-son’s deepest feeling of isolation combined with the recognition that this looming mass of landscape was the embodiment of his father’s permanent memory,” said art historian John Wilmerding in “The Helga Pictures” (Harry N. Abrams, 1987).

Regrets About Father

Wyeth, who always felt guilty that he had never done a portrait of his father before he died, began to paint people in earnest. Most were of a single figure, unsmiling and reflective, evoking a sense of loneliness. One of his most famous of this period was of Karl Kuerner, a German-born Chadds Ford neighbor whose farm he admired.

While in Maine on his 22nd birthday, Wyeth met Betsy Merle James, the daughter of a newspaper editor. They were married the following year. At their first meeting Betsy took Wyeth to Cushing to meet her long-time friend, Christina Olson, who was stricken with a degenerative disease that prevented her from walking. Christina, who refused to use a wheelchair, soon became Wyeth’s favorite subject, and the artist turned a second-story room in her house into his Maine studio.

Little Is Real

Though Wyeth often watched Christina crawling in her yard to pick flowers, little in “Christina’s World” is real, according to art historians.

Betsy posed for the figure; only the arms and hands were modeled by Christina herself. Wyeth eliminated many of the farm’s outbuildings and altered the space between the house and the barn. The slope of the hill was entirely Wyeth’s invention, said Christopher Crosman, former director of the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, Maine, which houses the Center for the Wyeth Family in Maine.

When Wyeth was finished, he knew “Christina’s World” was his greatest work.

“Nobody has seen it, but living with it as I work has made me feel certain that it goes way beyond my other work,” he wrote in a letter to his mother in 1948, according to “Andrew Wyeth: A Secret Life” by Richard Merryman (HarperCollins, 1996).

That same year, “Christina’s World” was purchased by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and Wyeth’s career soared.

Attendance Records

An exhibition drew hundreds of thousands of visitors to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia in 1966 and the Baltimore Museum of Art in 1966-67. The show broke attendance records at the Whitney Museum in New York before moving to the Art Institute of Chicago. The Boston Museum of Fine Arts hosted a retrospective in 1970. “Two Worlds of Andrew Wyeth: Kuerners and Olsons” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1976-77 was that museum first’s show devoted to a living American artist.

President John F. Kennedy awarded Wyeth the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, in 1963. In 1970 President Richard Nixon honored Wyeth with a dinner and private exhibition at the White House. In 1977, he became the first American artist since John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) to be admitted to the French Academy of Fine Arts.

In 2007, President George W. Bush awarded Wyeth the National Medal of the Arts for “a lifetime of paintings whose meticulous realism have captured the American consciousness.”

Wyeth’s works commanded some of the highest prices of any living U.S. artist. A tempera painting of a horse sold for $4.4 million at a Sotheby’s auction in 2006, according to AskART, an online database.

Family Tradition

The Wyeth family artistic tradition lives on through Andrew’s son, the oil painter Jamie Wyeth, who, like his father, had his first one-man show at age 20.

“He would paint incessantly, and it had an effect on me,” Jamie Wyeth told the Bangor (Maine) Daily News in 2005. “His lesson was that you take it seriously. You either do it or you don’t do it. If you do it, you do it all the time.”

After the Helga hoopla, Andrew Wyeth continued to paint at his studio in Chadds Ford. A sign posted outside says “I Do Not Sign Autographs.” When in Maine, he would visit the Farnsworth Art Museum and watch people looking at his paintings.

“He paints in such universal terms that we can all see a bit of ourselves in Wyeth,” Lucero Criswell of the Cincinnati Art Museum said in an interview. “In 100 years, there will still be that sense of connection to his work.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Mark Schoifet in New York at mschoifet@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: January 16, 2009 11:11 EST