Andrew Wyeth lives on in Maine's midcoast

It’s hard for fans of Andrew Wyeth to drive through these parts without the artist’s signature images popping up around every corner.

This is Wyeth central. The fields, the weather-worn clapboard, the rolling hills, and the weathered faces etched deeply by time and experience are all reminders of the painter’s most famous works.

For Wyeth, the embodiment of New England was found throughout this part of Maine, and particularly in and around the Olson House in nearby Cushing. The sense of time and place captured in exquisite detail on these canvases helped make him one of the most popular painters of the past century.

Wyeth has been gone for two years. He left behind a legacy of tempera paintings, watercolors and sketches capturing the people and the places of midcoast Maine that were closest to him. The most famous of these is “Christina’s World,” which hangs prominently in New York’s Museum of Modern Art, snapped up soon after its completion in 1948. The Olson House, where the painting is set, is scheduled this year to be named a National Historic Landmark. To mark the twentieth anniversary of the Farnsworth Museum’s acquisition of the property, it is presenting through Oct. 30 “Andrew Wyeth, Christina’s World and the Olson House.”

The Olson House is more than a backdrop to an iconic image; it has a history of its own. The house, its immediate environs and the two people who lived there preoccupied Wyeth like few other subjects, and the Farnsworth exhibition clearly demonstrates this. The stark, ever-windswept old house is hauntingly beautiful in its way, and in it Wyeth saw something deep, and even poetic.

Jamie Wyeth, the artist’s son and a well-known painter in his own right, took in the Farnsworth show on a recent morning, and said visitors to the exhibition will learn much about his father’s relationship to the old farmhouse out on Hathorn Point.

“They’ll see that this man was obsessed with the Olson farm. He painted it for decades,” he said. “People come from all over the world to paint Maine, and this was just down the road from him.

“The irony is the universality of this painting. It still has such relevance.”

The one-two punch of the Farnsworth and the Olson House provides a great summer getaway, and they’re less than four hours from Boston.

Begin with the exhibition, which features approximately fifty watercolors and drawings, including a dozen key studies for “Christina’s World.” There are interiors and exteriors of the old farmhouse and its surroundings, as well as scenes from the defiantly unglamorous lives of Christina Olson and her brother Alvaro.

They were self-sufficient despite ill health and desperate poverty, and Wyeth captured the drudgery, loneliness and the enduring spirit of the siblings that saw them through and kept him in thrall all those years. Still, there is an existential melancholy that pervades these paintings, not unlike the rest of Wyeth’s greatest work – death stalked, steeped in shadow, light and texture, and with a formal beauty that transcends the mundane making it seem miraculous.

A number of the works in the exhibition are on loan from a collection in Japan, and have rarely been seen in the United States.

A subsequent visit to the Olson House, about nine miles away as the crow flies, provides the real-life counterparts to these images. If the exhibition is about “Christina’s World” and its development and setting, a visit to the farmhouse gives visitors a visceral sensation of dwelling in a bygone era.

One can stand at the third-floor window through which more than 60 years ago Wyeth saw Christina dragging herself back toward the house after placing flowers on her parents’ graves. The house is redolent with the bleakness of the lives it once sheltered, from the peeling paint and half-stripped wallpaper to the creaky floors and dingy exterior.

Also, standing outside it’s easy to see the artistic license Wyeth took in creating his most famous painting: distances collapsed, the foreground steepened.

Most of all, the Olson House conveys the story of a family. Hearing the details of the lives that once animated these sparse rooms, and feeling the windows rattling loudly from a subtle summer breeze, is to be transported back to a time when corn seed was hung to dry in upstairs bedrooms and Christina wore out the kitchen floor dragging her chair from table to stove.

The sadness that swells up at this point in the tour is likely the realization that these dignified lives would have remained anonymous had not Wyeth sauntered up the hill, led by his future wife, Betsy, one day in 1939, and had his imagination stoked as never before.

Christina was unable to walk due to a progressive and undiagnosed neuromuscular disease. Her brother, Alvaro, took on the increasingly demanding care of his sister. This was in addition to harvesting blueberries and ice, caring for the chickens, planting corn and everything else that comes with life on a run-down, saltwater farm.

Our friendly tour guides explained the history of the house – a crackin’ maritime tale in its own right – and showed us the second floor bedroom that was turned over to Wyeth and his easel. There we looked out the same window from which he dropped his eggshells after mixing his tempera (a type of painting medium that uses egg yolk and pigment), and looked down the steep staircase where Christina, proud as ever, one night surreptitiously crawled up through the stale air of the house after the artist had left to see her likeness drying. The guides have a bevy of anecdotes – sad, funny and enlightening – about Wyeth and his hosts.

Any story about this artist needs to address the Wyeth chasm. This sounds like a landscape he might paint, but it’s actually a divide between his popular reputation and the opinion that critics and curators have toward his work.

The people love Wyeth; critics tend to dismiss him as a sentimental craftsman who dealt in nostalgia, and who was a mere “rural” painter. Indeed, he was a man out of step with his time, and proudly so. While the New York School and abstract expressionism were ascendant and taking over the American art scene, Wyeth held fast to the style and subject matter that most moved him.

More abstract at times than he’s given credit for, overall he believed in putting truth on the canvas and saw a spirituality in the people and places he painted, which he hoped to pass on to generations of viewers.

This is not the place to debate Wyeth’s critical legacy. Suffice it to say, fans of his work will enjoy “Andrew Wyeth, Christina’s World and the Olson House” now at the Farnsworth, and coupling this with a tour of the Olson House will come to a greater understanding of an indelible American image and the people and stories behind it. As Wyeth himself said about the Olson House: “It was Maine.”