Artist: Andrew Wyeth

Master Bedroom

Andrew Wyeth is widely considered to be the only genuine rural contemporary artist of any real consequence of his time. Country life has its own rhythms and intrinsic values and Andrew Wyeth is true to these attributes in his art.

In the same way that Andy Warhol is an icon for his take on urban American culture, so is Andrew Wyeth an icon for the way he depicts rural American life. His paintings tell us a story and peak our interest. Rural people respond to his work because it truthfully represents many aspects of their lives and they can relate to it. City people may perhaps understand it to be more of a cliché image of what they imagine country life to be.

The Painting

In his painting Master Bedroom, the simplicity of Wyeth’s work is what first affects us. It is a deceivingly simple straight forward painting. The room is well lived in, yet neat and charming. The bed is tidily made and one gets the feeling that the bed in this house is always tidily made; that the bed could no more be left unmade than the cows left unmilked and indeed, if the bed wasn’t made, it could only mean that something disastrous had occurred to prevent this chore from being done. There is warmth in the painting and because the bed takes up almost all of the space in the bedroom, it seems to indicate that the life that goes on in that bed is of vital importance to the rest of the unseen house. The love and secrets the bed is privy to has provided it with a life of its own, so much so that this image of a solitary bed, an inanimate object, appears to become a living, breathing character.

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