Presenting recently rediscovered drawings Life and Death explores what it means for an artist to picture their own death in both the context of Wyeths late career and contemporary American artThis volume presents for the first time a recently rediscovered series of pencil drawings from the early 1990s through which Wyeth imagined his own funeral. Chapters by leading art historians explore the significance of picturing ones own death in both the context of Wyeths late career and contemporary American art. The book connects the funeral series to Wyeths decadeslong engagement with death as an artistic subject in painting his relationships with the models depicted and his use of drawing as an expressive and exploratory medium. It further inserts Wyeths work into a larger conversation about mortality and selfportraiture that developed in American art since the 1960s and includes works by Duane Michals Andy Warhol David Wojnarowicz George Tooker Janaina Tschpe and Mario Moore. While his contemporaries posed a variety of existential questions in picturing their own passing those that interrogate the universality of death as a human experience have become especially urgent in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic and the national reckoning with racial inequality that emerged in 2020. Andrew Wyeth Life and Death thus addresses ideas about loss grief vulnerability and immortality that pervade the current moment.American painter Andrew Wyeth 19172009 lived his entire life in his birthplace of Chadds Ford Pennsylvania and his summer home in midcoast Maine. His sevendecade career was spent painting the land and people that he knew and cared about. Renowned for his tempera painting Christinas World 1948 Wyeth navigated between artistic representation and abstraction in a highly personal way.