My prior Art posts can be found HERE.
How do we move away from being a civilization that produces art that causes comments like, “my five year old could make this,” back to being one that creates beauty and inspires deep questions? We must reject modernity and embrace tradition.
Let’s study art history together.
Christina’s World
| Artist | Andrew Wyeth |
|---|---|
| Year | 1948 |
| Catalogue | 78455 |
| Medium | Egg tempera on gessoed panel |
| Dimensions | 81.9 cm × 121.3 cm (32+1⁄4 in × 47+3⁄4 in) |
| Location | Museum of Modern Art, New York |
| Accession | 16.1949 |
This painting was an early precursor to the Hollywood film technique of having a beautiful woman in a bright color (often red) appear on screen, in stark contrast to her dull, muted-color surroundings. The woman in the painting is in pink, but the general idea is essentially the same.
There is more depth to this painting, though, than the contrast of color. The painting is based on a real person, and the reason for her being on the ground is quite compelling. Perhaps a result of all of the above, this is one of the most famous realist paintings form the mid-20th century. (more via wiki)
Christina’s World is a 1948 painting by American painter Andrew Wyeth and one of the best-known American paintings of the mid-20th century. It is a tempera work done in a realist style, depicting a woman semi-reclining on the ground in a treeless, mostly tawny field, looking up at a gray house on the horizon, a barn, and various other small outbuildings are adjacent to the house. It is held by the Museum of Modern Art, in New York.
Background
The woman in the painting is Anna Christina Olson (May 3, 1893 – January 27, 1968). Anna had a degenerative muscular disorder, possibly polio, which left her unable to walk. She was firmly against using a wheelchair and so would crawl everywhere. Wyeth was inspired to create the painting when he saw her crawling across a field while he was watching from a window in the house. He had a summer home in the area and was on friendly terms with Olson, using her and her younger brother as the subjects of paintings from 1940 to 1968. Olson was the inspiration and subject of the painting, but she was not the primary model; Wyeth’s wife Betsy posed as the torso of the painting. Olson was 55 at the time that Wyeth created the work.
The house depicted in the painting is known as the Olson House in Cushing, Maine, and is open to the public, operated by the Farnsworth Art Museum. It is a National Historic Landmark and has been restored to match its appearance in the painting, although Wyeth separated the house from its barn and changed the lay of the land for the painting. Wyeth is buried in the nearby Olson family graveyard.
Reception and history
Christina’s World was first exhibited at the Macbeth Gallery in Manhattan in 1948. It received little attention from critics at the time, but Alfred Barr, the founding director of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), bought the painting for $1,800 (equivalent to $18,200 in 2023 dollars). He promoted it at MoMA, and it gradually grew in popularity. Today, it is considered an icon of American art and is rarely loaned out by the museum.
In popular culture
In Arthur C. Clarke‘s novel 2001: A Space Odyssey, Christina’s World is one of the two paintings (the other one being Vincent van Gogh‘s Bridge at Arles) hanging on the living room wall of “an elegant, anonymous hotel suite” to which the astronaut David Bowman is transported after passing through the Star Gate. It does not appear in the film adaptation directed by Stanley Kubrick. The painting is, however, part of the sci-fi film Oblivion (2013), paying homage to the novel.
The life of Olson and her encounter with Wyeth is portrayed in the novel A Piece of the World by Christina Baker Kline.
A scene in the 1994 film Forrest Gump and a chapter in the 2020 video game The Last of Us Part II were inspired by the painting.
The painting is also referenced in the 2020 film I’m Thinking of Ending Things, a season 4 episode of the TV series Atlanta, a Madeline Johnston song of the same name, and Ethel Cain‘s music video for the 2022 song “American Teenager”.
The painting appears several times throughout HBO’s Westworld (2016–2022). Showrunner Jonathan Nolan has at least once mentioned Christina’s World as a “reference” for the show’s character Dolores Abernathy. Evan Rachel Wood, who plays Dolores in seasons 1–3, reappears in season 4 as a character named “Christina”.
I just saw this for the first time recently and was wondering what the context was (if any), thanks Dusty!
You’re welcome! Yeah, I don’t think the backstory context is at all obvious from the work. But once you know it, it makes the work more interesting.
Beautiful painting and story behind it.
Thanks! Honestly, I don’t know much about art, so I am enjoying the learning and sharing process of this series.
When I was in college, my art appreciation class took a road trip to see a Wyeth exhibit at Bob Jones University. This would have been 1983 or ’84. I don’t think Christina’s World was there, but there were many others. Wyeth’s paintings are impressive in photos, but are amazing in person.
This series is kind of a tool to make me learn about the topic. I had heard of this painting before, but Wyeth was unknown to me before I did the write-up here. I am now very impressed. I will make a point to seek out Wyeth’s work, in person, when those opportunities present themselves in the future.
The painting does catch the loneliness I’ve often felt driving through my very rural home state, of how farmers live in these isolated places. It’s my understanding that in most of the world, for most of history, farmers lived together in villages and went out into the fields. I guess this is an example of how the primacy of capitalism isolates us.
The size of the average family also makes a big difference, too. You, your wife, and your seven kids might live on a farm. Down the road in both directions, you might find your numerous siblings doing the same. Just with that, the local community of family and cousins might number in the 40s or more. That was the norm for centuries. The kids who “moved away” moved off the farm and into the nearby town. Some of the children of those people would eventually move back onto a farm. The other families in the area were probably married into each other’s families (not too closely, hopefully) and then everyone attended the same 2 or 3 churches – depending on what part of the country you’re from.
Ending agrarianism for factory work took people not only off the farm, but out of the local town. When factory work then went away, people sought out their heart’s desires, but usually that desire didn’t consider familial proximity very much (nor did it seem it had to, with cars, planes, etc.) Now though I think we’re learning as a society that maybe the lack of proximity to family, and the increasingly small size of family, really does matter.
And when people try to set up a new family in a city, economic lures and pressures spin the family apart. My father’s side of the family is split up among three different cities, and my mother’s among five different cities. My brother, on the other hand, married into a family where his wife and her six siblings all live in the same town.