Farnsworth Art Museum: Art Cannot Be Contained

Wyeth painted his portrait of Ralph Cline, The Patriot, in the attic of Cline’s sawmill in Spruce Head, Maine in 1964. In that painting Cline wears his own World War I uniform. Andrew Wyeth noticed Ralph Cline in uniform at a Thomaston, Maine parade. Wyeth later recalled, “I remember his amazing figure, something about the way he walked, his build, this feeling of very erect. He had on a dark blue uniform of the Veterans of Foreign Wars and a little hat. I was struck by him... I try to leave myself very blank—a kind of sounding board, all the time very open to catch a vibration, a tone from something or somebody—like Ralph Cline.” 

The family named the beaches on their island in Maine, and on Driftwood Beach, Eliot Porter remembered its random display: “Along its upper edge, out of reach by all but the highest tides intermixed among the pebbles, periwinkles and bits of wood, is deposited a season’s harvest, the shells of mussels stripped from byssal anchors by winter ice, scored by waves and chalky blue. Scattered over them, a gay celebration, are the petals of rugosa roses, a gift from a bush rooted in the briny soil above the tides, an immigrant from across the sea.”

Cabot Lyman, Founder and Owner of Lyman-Morse Boatbuilding, discusses the George Bellows painting "The Teamster". In addition to founding Lyman-Morse, he has completed more than 150,000 miles of offshore voyages, including three years spent circumnavigating the world with his wife Heidi and their three sons, Alex, Drew, and Zach, on their 49-foot sailboat built at the yard.

Maria Nevelson, granddaughter of artist Louise Nevelson, describes the early days in Rockland for Louise's family, after their arrival from what is present-day Kiev

Farnsworth Chief Curator Michael K. Komanecky explores the history of one of American art's most iconic works: Robert Indiana's LOVE.

Cushing, Maine fiber artist Katharine Cobey builds three-dimensional forms by knitting with unusual fibers, metal wires, and plastics. Her stitches give shape to her viewpoints, integrating and shaping magical costumes or emblems of memory and loss. In this audio clip, she describes her work Portrait of Alzheimer's

Farnsworth Registrar Angela Waldron reads a selection of author Sarah Orne Jewett's book "Country of the Pointed Firs" - which is included the museum's current exhibition Transforming the Ordinary: Women in American Book Cover Design

Image: Andrew Wyeth, Adrift, 1982 tempera on panel. The Andrew and Betsy Wyeth Collection. © 2020 Andrew Wyeth/Artists Rights Society (ARS)

“Walter was my connection to Maine,” Wyeth said to a reporter a few days after Anderson died in 1987. “Out of him came Christina and all the others. But Walter was not a character to me. He was my own age.”

Throughout his life, the people and landscape of midcoast Maine had a profound influence on Andrew Wyeth. Although he was born in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, he spent every summer in Maine until his death in 2009. During those summers Andrew developed a lifelong friendship with Walt Anderson, son of the cook at the hotel, and they became inseparable. Andrew’s earliest works were watercolors of the very places that he and Walt discovered. These watercolors were colorful depictions of landscape and weather patterns along the coast in summer.

(Audio credit: Wyeth People, 1966, TV10, Charlson Productions.)