For his part, Wyeth claimed that “Christina’s World is more than just her portrait. It really was her whole life, and that is what she liked in it.” Furthermore, Anna Christina did like the painting, saying that “Andy put me where he knew I wanted to be. Now that I can’t be there anymore, all I do is think of that picture and I’m there.”
You Can Also READ: christinas world conflicting views on that very subject. When speaking about his early life studies of Anna Christina, he claimed that:
…my cold eye took in the deformity and it shook me. I hadn’t thought about the deformity. She was so much bigger than all the little idiosyncrasies… If you really are profound about a thing and really see its essence, you don’t have to have a prop like a deformity.
Rethinking Andrew Wyeth, edited by David Cateforis, 2014, University of California Press.
Why, then, did he not model the entire figure on his wife? The Christina of the painting is, as Randall C. Griffin puts it in his essay on Christina’s World, “a hybrid figure”, describing her thin arms as if “emerging from a different painting, one that peels back the scene’s sunny illusion.”
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Christina’s Word continues to split opinions on its treatment of disability. For sympathetic observers, the effect of the “hybrid figure” is a heightened awareness of Anna Christina’s condition, and an attempt to overcome reactions that might not initially see beyond her CMT to her personality. Meanwhile, for critics it is an attempt to gloss over her condition in service of aesthetics.
Idealism, or Realism?
Beyond Christina’s World, Wyeth painted unsparing portraits of Anna Christina, her brother, and countless other figures at the fringes of rural society. Portraits like Anna Christina, Oil Lamp, Grape Wine, and Anna Kuerner are frank depictions of introspective subjects, as forensically observed in Wyeth’s tempera landscapes.
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His figures are stark and totemic, but they are not glorified for being beautiful pastoral ideals. They are instead glorified for being deeply-embedded reflections of their home landscape. They happened to share that landscape with Wyeth, who canonizes them – and the tree stumps, cowsheds, and bland fields – by paying them close, transcendental attention.
Wyeth acknowledged the ways in which his work was interpreted:
People make me the American painter of the American scene.
Andrew Wyeth
Richard Meryman, Andrew Wyeth: A Spoken Self-Portrait, lecture recorded May 18, 2014. National Gallery of Art.
Whatever the man himself believed, his painting is no more an advertisement for a bygone country lifestyle than Edward Hopper’s heavy emphasis on isolation is a recommendation for urban living.
In fact, Hopper – an artist widely accepted in the American modernist art story, and an admirer of Wyeth’s work – shares more with the rural painter than many would like to admit. Mark Rothko identified it for himself, writing that both Hopper and Wyeth’s work was about “the pursuit of strangeness.”
Multiple “Americas”
Despite recognition from fellow artists, Wyeth was pitched against Abstract Expressionists like Rothko himself. Epochal critics like Clement Greenberg cast Wyeth as a wilfully unmodern artist, wrong-headedly dedicated to rural realism at a time when urban (mostly New York-based) abstraction was building American art’s credibility on the world stage.
Whatever nostalgia there is in Wyeth’s work, it does not demand a return to the fields, though. His painting is more concerned with the twilight of that land and lifestyle which formed a very real part of his day-to-day experience. As Thomas Hoving, former Director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art put it:
Wyeth didn’t paint a single sentimental picture in his life…[he] painted like a surgeon cuts. Crisp, flinty-eyed, and completely unsentimental…what’s really there is what you see.
Recalling Andy Wyeth
Wyeth was more concerned with the present than critics concerned with promoting New York – the nexus of America’s thrust into the international (and therefore validated) modern art world – have given him credit for.
Rather than sideline the subjects of paintings like Christina’s World – those rural figures that still made up close to 40% of the US population by 1950 – Wyeth made them his focus. It is part of what made his art, in Andrew Brighton’s words, “populist, rather than just popular.”
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The painting continues to inform and inspire newly-minted American icons. Recently, the videogame series The Last of Us featured a version of the Olson farm and the final season of Donald Glover’s Atlanta included an episode entitled Andrew Wyeth. Alfred’s World.
