The Chadds Ford dairy farm Andrew Wyeth drew a thousand times over seven decades
The artist could have gone anywhere to paint anything. Instead, he spent a lifetime contemplating the Kuerner Farm less than two miles from his childhood home.
After serving as a machine gunner for Germany in World War I, Karl Kuerner Sr. became a sheep herder. He immigrated to the United States in 1923, and his wife and daughter followed him over in 1925. A year or two later, they began renting a farm in Chadds Ford, where they raised Brown Swiss dairy cattle.
By the early 1940s, the Kuerner family owned the farm.
The Wyeths lived just up the road and, on an aimless walk, artist Andrew Wyeth discovered the farm as a teenager, painting it for the first time in 1933. He quickly became obsessed with its landscape, architecture, and inhabitants, namely Kuerner and his wife, Anna.
When Wyeth’s father, N.C., was killed in 1945 (struck by a train on a track running through the farm), Kuerner became a father figure for Wyeth, who was fascinated with the farmer’s military background and disciplined, dutiful nature.
With the notoriety and success he eventually earned, Wyeth could have gone anywhere to paint anything. Instead, he spent a lifetime contemplating this humble farm less than two miles from his childhood home, where a seven-decade fixation produced inspiration and muses to sustain a prolific regionalist practice.
He created nearly 1,000 paintings of Kuerner Farm. Some 315 of these were collected in the 1976 book Wyeth at Kuerners by Betsy James Wyeth, his wife.
“Any other kid that would come over here, my grandfather would have put him to work,” said Karl J. Kuerner, grandson of Karl Kuerner Sr., who grew up on the farm, got to know Andrew Wyeth well, and became a painter himself.
The young, frail Wyeth, he said, reminded Kuerner Sr. of his brother, a painter back in Germany.
“Andy had free rein of the place. He could come and go as he pleased.”
Wyeth enjoyed that freedom for the rest of his life, exploring every contour of the social fabric at Kuerner Farm. “He didn’t come over here just to paint. He came over here to witness the lives being lived,” Kuerner said.
“I can’t think of very many stories in the history of Western art like it,” Wyeth Foundation curator William L. Coleman said. “There are a few parallels, but rarely does an artist go so deep for so long.”
Brandywine Museum of Art‘s ongoing “Andrew Wyeth at Kuerner Farm: The Eye of the Earth” show features more than 40 of Wyeth’s paintings inspired by the site, including some previously unexhibited ones, along with ephemera from the farm to contextualize life there beyond Wyeth’s gaze.
Wyeth’s earliest works are reminiscent of Cezanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire series, marked by a similar thematic infatuation. A few early landscapes, including a rare oil painting, Chestnut Tree (1933), boasts pops of color that disappeared from Wyeth’s brushes until much later in his career, much after he’d spent decades studying Kuerner Farm subjects in mostly grays and greenish browns.
The works in this exhibition complicate Wyeth’s reputation as a realist; he documented life on the farm but embellished and invented it, too.
The same white three-story house is portrayed a little differently each time, with windows and wires and other details added or omitted. The hanging birds in Woodshed (1944), the wrenched topography in Wolf Moon (1975), the eldest Kuerner melting into the hillside in Spring (1979), the anachronistic meeting of revelers in Snow Hill (1989): all fabrications of varying surrealness and abstraction.
“Andy said one time, ‘Never take people to where I do the paintings, because they’re inevitably disappointed,’” Kuerner said.
Wyeth’s arresting portrait of Karl Kuerner Sr., titled Karl (1948), renders the farmer from the shoulders up below a yawning gray ceiling, punctuated only by cracks and menacing sausage hooks. Kuerner’s face carries the trauma of war, while the empty hooks promise more violence to come.
“Karl Kuerner [Sr.] seemed to convey these evocative, romantic, or dangerous narratives from his past and from his present, this kind of hardness or harshness that the artist sensed in his physical appearance,” Coleman said. “And so through painting Karl Kuerner repeatedly, he tries to draw out some of the stories of the imagined Karl Kuerner.”
Growing up on this farm, Karl J. Kuerner has a connection to nearly every work in this exhibition. He remembers seeing his late wife bring the horse around to the right spot for Wyeth to paint the animal in Fenced In (2001), the most recent piece in the exhibition. When he was 3 or 4 years old, he watched Wyeth paint Young Bull Study (1960).
When Kuerner began studying under Carolyn Wyeth in the early 1970s, she told him to go home and paint something that means something to him. “I thought, ‘How can I do that? Your brother’s over there. He’s covered everything,’” Kuerner said.
But Andrew Wyeth encouraged Kuerner to find his own voice. From Kuerner’s earliest days as an artist — he went on to attend the Art Institute of Philadelphia — “rather than treating me as some little snot-nosed kid, [Wyeth] always treated me on the same level.”
Kuerner has been drawing inspiration from the farm throughout his career and teaches classes on the grounds, where other artists can explore those subjects, too.
In 1999, he and his father, Karl Kuerner Jr., donated the farm to the Brandywine Conservancy and Museum of Art. Brandywine operates tours of the site, recognized as a National Historic Landmark in 2011, just a few minutes from the museum and the studios of Andrew and N.C. Wyeth.
“[Wyeth] froze the farm in time, and we helped seal the deal to preserve that physically,” Kuerner said. “We gave the farm to the conservancy because of our love of the farm and our love of the arts. For the future artists who come over here and paint, they can look at the history of the place, but then they can make a history going forward with their work.”
“Andrew Wyeth at Kuerner Farm: The Eye of the Earth,” through Sept. 28. Brandywine Museum of Art, 1 Hoffmans Mill Rd., Chadds Ford, brandywine.org