Spring
Beginning in the 1930s and continuing for over five decades, the Chadds Ford farm of Karl and Anna Kuerner was at the heart of Andrew Wyeth’s artistic sphere in Pennsylvania. The couple had immigrated from Germany in the 1920s after Karl’s service in the German army as a machine gunner during World War I. Wyeth was deeply fascinated by both the couple and the farm, documenting his responses in hundreds of drawings, watercolors and temperas through the years.
In painting Karl Kuerner, Wyeth observed and depicted the passage of time as Kuerner grew older and eventually became ill with leukemia. In this surreal scene, a meditation on death and regeneration, Wyeth imagined Kuerner encased in vestiges of ice at the base of Kuerner Hill. This was a powerful location for the artist, close to the railroad tracks where his father had died so tragically in 1945, a symbolic reminder of that death.
