Jamie Wyeth: Unsettled with Amanda Burdan

A major new monograph from American realist painter Jamie Wyeth traces the dark and uneasy in his work. The artist will be in conversation with Amanda Burdan, senior curator at the Brandywine Museum of Art, followed by a signing.

PLEASE NOTE: RSVPs are encouraged but not required. Seating is limited and will be first come, first served. Doors open at 5:30 pm.

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A major monograph of the American realist artist, descendant of one of America’s most revered artistic families, and painter of dark and uneasy subjects.
This book traces a persistent vein of intriguing, often disconcerting, imagery over the career of renowned artist Jamie Wyeth (b. 1946), famous for his hyperrealist paintings of farm animals and Maine lighthouses. The focus in this volume is on the chilling thread that runs through his work, present but not overwhelming, and ever-evolving with his style and subjects. Whether he is introducing curious characters or surveying strange landscapes, Wyeth is at home with uneasy subjects and a master of the unsettled mood.
Like his father, Andrew Wyeth, and grandfather N. C. Wyeth before him, Jamie Wyeth splits his time between the Brandywine River Valley of Pennsylvania and Delaware and the mid-coast of Maine. In these two locales Wyeth has passed through many “obsessions,” as he calls his favored subjects: farm tools brimming with the potential for violence, eccentric portraits and unnerving figure studies, haunted places, and possessed plants and animals. In addition to the main essay, contributors explore the creation of similarly unsettling moods in film, dance, sound artistry, and classical music.

Photo by Ed Cunicelli

A celebrated contemporary realist painter, Jamie Wyeth is also a third-generation artist and member of a famed American artistic dynasty. Though many of his works reflect the eternal beauty of the Maine landscape or the enduring dignity of domestic animals and wildlife, others are intensely of their time, depicting important individuals and cultural events in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Included among these are portraits of political and entertainment figures, including President John F. Kennedy, Rudolf Nureyev, Andy Warhol, and Arnold Schwarzenegger; charcoal drawings that documented the unfolding drama of the Senate Watergate hearings; and pictorial reporting of NASA space launches and landings. He has been the subject of a retrospective at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; an exhibition of his and his father’s works at the Denver Art Museum titled, Wyeth: Andrew and Jamie in the Studio was exhibited in Denver as well as in Madrid; and now there is a traveling exhibition of his works titled, Jamie Wyeth: Unsettled.

Born in Wilmington, Delaware, Wyeth spends a substantial portion of his time on the Maine coast, where the landscape and local inhabitants-animal and human-serve as subjects for his work. He paints primarily in oil and watercolor, having never developed an affinity for the egg tempera medium favored by his father. With their compelling images, strong contrasts, and tactile surfaces, Jamie Wyeth's works are marked with a portrait-like intensity, whether they depict people, animals, architecture, objects, or the continually unfolding interaction between mankind and nature.

A specialist in American art, Amanda Burdan is the Senior Curator at the Brandywine River Museum of Art and has organized many exhibitions on the fine and decorative arts of the United States. She also oversees the Museum’s historic properties (the N.C. Wyeth House and Studio, the Kuerner Farm, and the Andrew Wyeth Studio) and the Walter and Leonore Annenberg Research Center.

She has organized a number of exhibitions about the work of Jamie Wyeth, including the Farnsworth Art Museum’s Jamie Wyeth, Rockwell Kent, and Monhegan in 2014 and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston’s Jamie Wyeth retrospective at the Brandywine in 2015. Her current exhibition Jamie Wyeth: Unsettled examines the anxious and disconcerting imagery persisting throughout the artist’s career. The exhibition travel to four additional venues (the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, Maine; the Greenville County Museum of Art in Greenville, South Carolina, the Dayton Art Institute in Dayton, Ohio, and the Frye Art Museum in Seattle, Washington) after it closes at Brandywine.

Her interest in the transatlantic influences on American art inform two of her recent exhibitions and catalogues: America’s Impressionism: Echoes of a Revolution (2021) and Rural Modern: American Art Beyond the City (2016). Both exhibitions examined the adoption and adaptation of European styles of art to suit the American public and critical taste, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the interwar period, respectively. A scholar of women artists, she delved into the visual culture of the suffrage movement for the 2020 exhibition Votes for Women: A Visual History, mounted in recognition of the centennial of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution.

Amanda joined the curatorial staff of the Brandywine River Museum of Art in 2012 and previously worked in the curatorial departments at the Florence Griswold Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Rhode Island School of Design Museum of Art. She earned her master’s degree and Ph.D. at Brown University, writing a dissertation entitled “Américaines in Paris: The Role of Women Artists in the Formation of America’s Cultural Identity, 1860-1880.”

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Rizzoli Bookstore, 1133 Broadway, New York, United States