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Andrew
Wyeth died two weeks ago at the age of 91, a polarizing figure in
the American art world - considered a master by some, disdained by
others for the streak of populism in his work. Wyeth courted
publicity like a rock star and the public loved him back.
His most famous work is perhaps Christina's World, which
continues to exert its eerie charms and is among the
most-reproduced paintings of the 20th century. Wyeth's large
tempera painting is of Christina Olson, a disabled woman, as she
sits on the grass, face mysteriously turned away from the viewer,
looking up towards the Olson Home, a weather-beaten farmhouse. A
fascinating quality of Christina's World is its ability to
straddle worlds, to appear at once realistic and Gothic, to
simultaneously soothe and disturb. A timelessness within the
realism of his work, as if a detailing of every hair or blade of
grass holds the picture still in the eternity of a Maine
afternoon. Wyeth achieves this tension by means of simple
composition and visual implication and the painting's strange pull
lies in its sense of mystery. Christina's face is entirely
hidden. She is without identity and one wonders who
Christina really is, as well as why her world seems so strangely
empty. The sky above is perfectly gray and clear in an
unnatural way; there is not a cloud or bird in the unmoving calm
of it all. The awkward position of Christina's body, her
thin arms barely supporting her frame and her hair slightly
disheveled implying that she has perhaps just woken up or may be
hiding from something in the faraway farmhouses.
Wyeth's
grayish-green and brown palette contributes to the sense that is
something is askew. The fields stretch out endlessly. But
mostly it is what Wyeth leaves out that produces the mystery and
the almost palpable sense of desire: to see Christina's face, to
know what she is thinking, to find out why she remains so distant
- both literally and figuratively - from those plain,
austere-looking sheds and farmhouse. The viewer reads all
these things (alienation, strangeness and mystery) into the
work. The tempera that he used provides a certain matte
finish, a dulling of the colors. Wyeth actually used the
attic of the Olson Home as a studio when he was younger and said
of the house, "In the portraits of that house, the windows
are eyes or pieces of the soul, almost… to me, each window is a
different part of Christina's life."
See:
Christina's
World, MoMA
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