Nearly 75 watercolors from Andrew Wyeth's estate are hanging on the walls of the Cleveland Museum of Art starting this weekend, and most of them have never been shown publicly before. The exhibition, titled Spectacular Freedom: Andrew Wyeth and the Modern American Watercolor, opened Sunday and runs through January 18, 2027, offering the first deep dive into a side of Wyeth's career that even devoted fans of his work may not know well.
According to the Cleveland Museum of Art, the show presents nearly 75 works from the artist's estate, most of which have never been on view, and it is billed as the first in-depth exploration of Wyeth's watercolors. The exhibition sits in the museum's Kelvin and Eleanor Smith Foundation Gallery, listed as Special Exhibition Gallery 004, and it was organized by the Cleveland Museum of Art in collaboration with the Brandywine Museum of Art, located in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, per Cleveland.com.
From Rural Pennsylvania to the Maine Coast
Wyeth's watercolors captured the people and places around him in rural Pennsylvania and coastal Maine, the museum's exhibition page notes. The show covers a wide swath of his career, according to Cleveland.com, spanning his early work, landscapes from both states, private scenes from his life, reimagined landscapes, and abstraction. The exhibition also includes a few of his tempera paintings alongside the watercolors, plus his own paints, brushes, and other tools used in the studio.
Wyeth was born in 1917 and died in 2009, and he used watercolor constantly throughout his career, producing thousands of watercolors over the decades, per the same outlet's reporting. He received a set of paints at age 13 and held his first major solo exhibition of watercolors in 1937, when he was just 20 years old, according to Cleveland.com.
Curator Sifted Through 7,000 Watercolors
The exhibition's curator, Britany Salsbury, who serves as the Cleveland Museum of Art's curator of prints and drawings, selected the show's works from roughly 7,000 Wyeth watercolors while collaborating with the Brandywine Museum of Art, Cleveland.com reports. Salsbury said the collaboration gave her a new understanding of Wyeth's watercolor practice, and she noted that Wyeth remained deliberate even when his work looked improvisational, according to the outlet.
That improvisational quality is part of what drew one critic, per the Cleveland Museum of Art, to describe Wyeth's watercolor work as having a “spectacular freedom” — the phrase that gives the exhibition its title. The museum's exhibition page adds that Wyeth began experimenting with watercolor in the 1930s, a period when interest in the medium was expanding across the country, and that his practice resulted in both loose sketches and fully finished sheets.
A Museum With Just One Wyeth in Its Collection
The Cleveland Museum of Art normally holds only one Andrew Wyeth work in its permanent collection, and that piece is currently out on loan, according to Cleveland.com. That makes this exhibition a rare opportunity for local audiences to see the breadth of Wyeth's output all at once, rather than a single painting on a wall.
Among the highlights cited by Cleveland.com are pieces like The New Church, created in 1940, and Below the Dam—First Version from 1963, on which Wyeth altered the paper's surface with sandpaper to create an illusion of moving water. The outlet also reports that the show includes five watercolors not shown publicly in nearly a century, along with 17 watercolors never publicly exhibited before now, and that visitors can see four different representations of a lobster in the galleries, out of a total of 12 lobster images Wyeth created over his career.
Publication and Museum Store Tie-Ins
The exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated publication, and it is a ticketed show, according to Cleveland.com. For those inspired to try the medium themselves, the museum's store is offering watercolor books and kits tied to the exhibition, the outlet notes. The show remains on view in the Kelvin and Eleanor Smith Foundation Gallery through January 18, 2027.
