Abstract Consciousness In Representation

Andrew Wyeth, who is characterized by individuality, is one of the best-known American painters of the 20th century. The outstanding characteristic of his works is that the inner abstract spirit is represented by the realistically representational figures. Wyeth lived in the era in which the stream of western modernist art emerged. However, he lived the surface undisturbed, far away from the market of art. Therefore, distinct regional and national art style came into being. We can apprehend Wyeth's realistic painting from two perspectives. On the one hand, in terms of technic, his realistic painting is based on the inheriting of European tradition, especially represented in tempera. On the other hand, his realistic painting bears explicit modern consciousness, differing from former realistic classicalism, both in the form and in the spirit connotation. The abstract consciousness represented in his works is self-consciousness based on the self-centered of modern arts, differing, in nature, from the abstract elements which is spontaneous in traditional realistic painting. Representational figure is the form to express the abstract spirit world only by Wyeth. Realistic painting--representational language system and symbolization--abstract language system are the two camps in the development of the painting history, among which recurrence and representative consciousness impact and syncretize more frequently, with the emergence and the development of modern art. As an artist, who lived in the modern world, the impact and the syncretization inevitably came into being in Wyeth's art creativity. Wyeth did not select the prevalent abstract expressionism at that time, but chose the way in which the abstract consciousness is represented by the representational figures. I'll explore the reasons for the compromised way to Wyeth's art through the research of the era he lived, his education background, his experiences, and so forth in this dissertation. Moreover, combining an amount of the picture analysis, I'll search the relevance between the realistic representational language and the abstract consciousness, and open out the essence, cause and concrete representation of the abstract consciousness included in Wyeth's art. Based on the in-depth research of the painting form language and the abstract core, I'll see through the modernity and realistic significance in Wyeth's art.