Andrew Wyeth - Life and Death (Relié)

Nearly two decades before his death, Andrew Wyeth made a series of drawings in which he imagined his own funeral. The artworks, dating to the early 1990s, portray Wyeth's friends, neighbors, and his wife, Betsy, surrounding a wooden box at the base of Kuerner's Hill in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, a site he long associated with death. Some of the drawings offer a view inside the coffin, revealing a rare self-portrait.
Publishing for the first time these recently rediscovered sketches, now known as the Funeral Group, Andrew Wyeth : Life and Death considers Wyeth's decades-long exploration of death as an artistic subject. Juxtaposing the Funeral Group with other reflections on mortality through self-portraiture, this volume shows Wyeth deeply engaged in existential questions that have long preoccupied conceptual, performance, and activist artists about confronting one's own passing and the universality of death as a human experience.
In the wake of the coronavirus pandemic and the national reckoning with racial inequality that intersected in 2020, Andrew Wyeth : Life and Death addresses ideas about loss, grief, vulnerability, and mortality that pervade the current moment.