Banking on fine art: WSFS backs Winterthur/UD restoration of historic Wyeth masterpiece
ART: http://www.udel.edu/PR/NewsReleases/98/WSFS/wyeth.html
Contact:
UD - Ginger Pinholster, (302) 831-6408, [email protected];
WSFS - Marty Katz, (302) 571-7288, [email protected]
WILMINGTON, DEL.-The late N.C. Wyeth's historic $1 million homage to working families-believed in 1932 to be the largest U.S. painting of its kind in any public building-will be restored to its original luster this summer, thanks to the Wilmington Savings Fund Society (WSFS) and the Winterthur/University of Delaware Program in Art Conservation.
WSFS, the principal subsidiary of WSFS Financial Corp. (NASDAQ/NMS:WSFS), will invest $40,000 to restore Wyeth's massive mural, Apotheosis of the Family, created to commemorate the bank's 100th anniversary. Beginning June 8, Winterthur/UD conservators will work on scaffolding during banking hours in a busy, public lobby at 838 Market St., thereby providing visitors with a rare opportunity to witness the meticulous restoration process, WSFS President Marvin ("Skip") Schoenhals said.
"We felt a responsibility to be good stewards of this national treasure, and to help make fine art more accessible to the community," Schoenhals explained. "Our bank was founded 166 years ago on a promise to serve ordinary citizens, at a time when traditional banks were catering only to wealthy clients. Because Wyeth's mural celebrates the achievements of working families, it has become inextricably linked with WSFS."
Similarly, artwork by various Wyeth family members and by famed American illustrator Howard Pyle (1853-1911) now represents "an integral aspect of life in the Brandywine Valley," says Prof. Joyce Hill Stoner of the Winterthur/UD graduate program in art conservation-one of only four in North America. Widely regarded as Pyle's most talented student, Newell Convers Wyeth (1882-1945), of nearby Chadds Ford, Pa., strongly influenced his artist-son, Andrew, as well as Andrew's son, Jamie. This group of artists-abbreviated by Stoner as "P-W3"-will claim the national limelight June 21, when a new Wyeth Center opens in Rockland, Maine, she notes.
"It's fitting that WSFS is launching this restoration project now," says Stoner, who recently completed a 60-page essay for the Wyeth Center's opening exhibition, "Wondrous Strange," which will visit the Delaware Art Museum in December. "This is, indeed, the Year of the Wyeths!"
Conserving a cultural icon
Spanning a space some 60 feet long and 19 feet high in the bank's central branch building, Apotheosis of the Family features a compelling depiction of the artist's famous son, Andrew Newell Wyeth. Born in 1917, Andrew was 15 when his father began painting Apotheosis, Stoner says. At the center of the mural, the creator of Christina's World (1948), now in his 80s, is shown as an adolescent nude, hoisting a bow and arrow.
Painted in oil across five pieces of canvas, the mural shows a family standing in front of a house, surrounded by neighbors harvesting fruit, weaving baskets, planting crops, hauling fish and chopping timber. Apotheosis also traces the seasons, from left to right, as spring merges into summer, then autumn and winter-a theme N.C. Wyeth may have borrowed from his son-in-law, Peter Hurd. At the request of former WSFS executive Frederick Stone, Hurd painted a four-part, seasonal 1932 mural of the Brandywine Valley, which still graces the dining room of a local home, Stoner reports.
Apotheosis falls within a category of "grand-manner classical" mural paintings, popular in the late 1800s, intended to celebrate fine art while inspiring hard work and high ideals, Stoner says. At the same time, however, bright colors, unusual perspectives and powerful abstract forms of clouds, smoke and sea reflect Wyeth's interest in avant-garde Russian art, and works by Marc Chagall (1887-1985), she says.
Unlike Apotheosis, earlier art by N.C. Wyeth, such as the Treasure Island series, featured dark colors and highly precise renderings of pirates and ships, says UD graduate student Alexis Miller, who will be on-site daily to manage the student restoration team. "Later in his career, N.C. Wyeth began painting with much brighter colors, and he often painted in a new, more modern way," says Miller, a Williamsburg, Va., native, who will be supervised by Stoner and three other senior conservators: Winterthur Paintings Conservator Mark Bockrath, an adjunct associate professor at UD; Associate Prof. Richard Wolbers; and Barbara A. Buckley, a UD graduate and independent conservator based in West Chester, Pa., who received her Master's-level training at the Cooperstown Graduate Programs in upstate New York.
"Since 1932, grime and a coat of yellowing varnish have muted those colors. We're going to bring them back to life," Miller says.
Because some sections of the mural, such as a gold border, have never been cleaned, Miller says, grime has been accumulating for the past 66 years. A protective varnish, applied in the late 1970s and now rapidly yellowing, must be removed, too. In addition, Bockrath says, the painting needs to be retouched to hide seams between the different sections of canvas. To complete this work, the Winterthur/UD conservators will use new gel-based solvents and resin soaps, developed by Wolbers, whose background includes medical research as well as art conservation. "We'll be on scaffolding, with WSFS employees and customers all around us, so we can't use any drippy, smelly or toxic solvents," Stoner explains. "We're fortunate to have on our team a great inventor of art conservation methods, who has established an international reputation in the field."
Apotheosis of the Family must be properly maintained, says Donald H. Hadley II, WSFS vice president of administrative services, because "it belongs, in a symbolic sense, to the whole community." Despite the bank's status as one of the country's top-performing independent banks, he says, "customers still think of us as a hometown bank, and we need to be good neighbors."
WSFS Financial Corp. is a $1.5 billion financial services company. Its principal subsidiary, WSFS, operates 18 retail-banking offices in New Castle County and Dover, Del., as well as two in Delaware and Montgomery counties, Pa. Other operating subsidiaries include WSFS Credit Corp.; Community Credit Corp.; and the 838 Investment Group Inc. For more information, visit the Web site, http://www.wsfsbank.com
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