Joséphine Douet & Andrew Wyeth: The Secret Sits
June 30 - September 9, 2022
Adelson Galleries is pleased to present an exhibition of 12 photographs by Joséphine Douet alongside 12 watercolors by Andrew Wyeth. Douet’s inspired “Wyeth Wonderland” series was featured at the Hudson River Museum in 2017, and we’re thrilled to exhibit a selection of works by both artists at our New York gallery this summer.
View the full e-catalog below.
The Fuller Building
595 Madison Avenue, 4th Floor, New York, NY
Tuesday - Friday, 11am - 6pm
The Secret Sits
Artist Statement by Josephine Douet
“We dance round in a ring and suppose, but the secret sits in the middle and knows.”
– Robert Frost
For an artist, exploring the close at hand means penetrating a never-ending mystery. Through his painting, Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009) became one of the few great masters capable of delving into and revealing this enigma. Wyeth’s work, which is both completely individual and distinctive, is now regarded as a key pillar of the vision of modern America for his deep, manipulative and obsessive work on his close circle. His native town, Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, provided his source of inspiration for his form of abstract realism, achieved through the exploration of its natural setting, buildings and inhabitants.
My decision to follow in Wyeth’s footsteps and retrace this intimate relationship in order to photograph and share it arose from a combination of admiration and artistic challenge. My aim was to capture something of the mystery and essence of Wyeth – of his modus operandi with settings and models – for which purpose I walked among the hills of Chadds City and forced an intimacy with its inhabitants.
Living among these people and this place for a limited time offered me a new perspective and enabled me to create my own proximity and photograph it. It allowed me to work on the feeling of belonging to a place. This was a process of finding myself “out of place,” a deliberate dislocation in order to start afresh in my relationships with the area and its people to the point of breaking down distances and grasping something of that intimacy, penetrating the enigma once again, dealing with seduction, distance and uneasiness – both from the model’s side and from mine.
As a kind of artistic mise en abîme, not only did I build up close relationships with the people of Chadds Ford, but also with some of Andrew Wyeth’s former models, including Helga Testorf, his secret model for fifteen years, in a never-ending game of mirrors between painting and photography.
The 12 photographs included in this show have thus arisen in harmony with the painter’s own sensibility as both a continuation and variation of it, given that my sense of closeness is a different one and the secrets that it reveals are hitting different spots. I created my own parallel world from and inside his.
