Sometimes, I believe there is a sudden attraction in the artworks, which infuses artistic creativity to form a mysterious realm around them. A painting is much more than an arrangement of colors to depict a subject and emotion, but it is not necessarily about excellent craftsmanship. They might be like the stories of a moment, which connects the viewer to a place where body and spirit intersect. And if that is not happening when you look at any artwork, then it is a mere visual representation of something and not a painting. And please don’t connect artistic creativity with craftsmanship, as they are not the same thing. Although craftsmanship displays intelligence or shrewdness, artistic creativity brings a level of thought to the canvas that not everyone is capable of. It adds an earthiness and an emotional bridge of the viewer’s state of mind to the spirit or intellect. While it adds the most to any canvas, very few artists attained it. One of them who mastered it was Andrew Wyeth, known for his acutely sensitive and virtually superstitious paintings. He believed his painting ideas came to him “by chance” or “through the back door.” Over his long career, he mostly stood apart from the rest of the artistic world, as he was a sporadically celebrated artist. But despite this, he was often taken for granted, even ignored, and people seldom learned his artworks in depth. However, there was always this insane astonishment and curiosity in the art world for this major American artist because of his accomplishment of connecting your state of mind with the spirit. One of his most famous artworks, Christina’s World, explains this connection well. Today, we are going to learn every aspect of this artwork in this article.
Christina’s World | Fast Knowledge
Christina’s World is an egg tempera on panel painting, which was composed by the famous American artist Andrew Wyeth in 1948. It portrays Christina Olson on the ground as she looks towards the long-distanced farmhouse. The painting is on exhibition at MoMA, New York.
General Information About Wyeth’s Artwork.
1. Artist’s Statement.
“I think anything like that-
which is contemplative, silent, shows a person alone-
people always feel sad. Is it because we’ve lost the art of being alone?”
2. Subject Matter.
Christina’s World is a classic creation by Andrew Wyeth in 1948, representing societal loneliness. It portrays two plain farmhouses in a greyish-brown theme, sitting at the crest of a dun-colored hill. In the foreground, a woman in a faded pink dress lies on the ground, as she props herself up on her arms, facing away from the viewers to look at one of the farm buildings. Though the subject matter is unassuming, the composition is well balanced as the viewer’s eye keeps moving back and forth in the direction where Christina sees. The artist explains the artwork in his own words,
“Christina’s World is more than just her portrait. It really was her whole life, and that is what she liked about it. She loved the feeling of being out in the field, where she couldn’t go finally at the end of her life. I saw her in the field, not exactly in that location, but a lot of it came out of what she told me. She was out getting some vegetables, and she was pulling herself slowly back toward the house.”
We will learn more about the subject matter by the psychological context in the later sections of the article.
3. Artist.
Andrew Wyeth painted Christina’s World. Throughout the long career of the artist, he painted ordinary things as the surrogates of the human presence. Often, he painted landscapes that looked like abstracted still lifes, either by focusing on elements of nature within the scene or composing them like still lifes. Therefore, many of the images in his collection feature a body that is objectified or a sitter that is isolated. His portraits, which are in almost square formats, possess a stark stillness of form and mood, especially the face and torso. As Wyeth matured, he developed an understanding of the abstract and psychological art aspects. A similar consistency has been maintained in his style, nearly from the beginning, a quality shared by Edward Hopper and Georgia O’Keeffe, two of his famous contemporaries.
In his artwork, we seek to appreciate the inner life of things and the formality of his designs.
4. Date.
Christina’s World painting dates back to 1948.
5. Provenance.
A little provenance of the painting is that in 1948, Wyeth looked out of the window of the farmhouse he was sharing with Christina and his brother. He saw Christina Olson dragging herself with her arms across the grass outside her kitchen door, and that same evening, during a dinner party, the idea of Christina’s World was formed in the artist’s mind and eye. We will talk about this in more detail in later sections of the article, which consists of the entire historical context of the artwork.
More importantly, it was his breakthrough painting that catapulted Andrew Wyeth into a stratosphere of fame: an American household name, who was certified by elite museums and wealthy collectors. The tempera he painted between 1959 and 1962 brought record prices to three museums. Along with Grant Wood’s American Gothic, Gilbert Stuart’s Portrait of George Washington, and James McNeill Whistler’s Study in Grey and Black, Christina’s World was one of America’s four incredible images. Christina herself became famous after this artwork as Tourists used to stalk the house, peering her from the windows and taking pictures of her.
6. Location.
The painting is on exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York City, NY, USA.
7. Technique and Medium.
The artist used egg on tempera on the panel as the medium to paint this composition. Andrew made the first notation in pencil and then did a second drawing, squared off to transfer to a panel. Then, he drew it with little of his mind and imagination. After, he got a panel of dimensions 49 x 32, which he squared off and lined up. Andrew would often use preliminary watercolors or drawings with ink, dry brush, or pencil in the completed painting. Many Wyeth works carry the memory trace from the studies, which can sometimes make the viewer feel an unsettling sense of expectancy, apprehension, or even violence that is felt rather than seen in the finished work. As Wyeth stated in an interview published in Time in 1963, his ability to eliminate unnecessary detail while maintaining a painting’s overall mood or theme was so strong by then that he believed
“he could even have removed Christina from Christina’s World and still conveyed the same sense of loneliness.”
Andrew used contemporary realism to paint the composition. In the later temperas of the artist, he added finicky strokes undergirded by the same wild underpainting Wyeth used for his watercolors. His paintings conservator explained,
“These are very savage paintings, scraped and beaten. I see the anger under there.”
| Artist | Andrew Wyeth |
| Year Painted | 1948 |
| Genre | Figurative Still-Life |
| Period | Contemporary Realism |
| Medium | Egg tempera on gessoed panel |
| Dimensions | 81.9 x 121.3 cm |
| Price | Not on sale |
| Where is it housed? | Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York City, NY, US |
Detailed Description of Christina’s World.
About the Artist: Andrew Wyeth.
Born on 12 July 1917 in rural Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, Andrew Newell Wyeth was the youngest son of Carolina Borkius Wyeth and renowned illustrator, N.C. Wyeth. Getting inspired by his father, four of the five children of the family took art as their profession. As a young child, Wyeth was more prone to illness, which is why he was schooled at home. When he was three, the family began spending school in Maine, where they enjoyed living in nature, relishing their intellect by visiting guests. In a later interview with the artist, he explains his childhood,
“Art was in the air, as you say, but not so much for me, curiously enough. I was the youngest of five children and was frail and unhealthy. I never went to formal school but was tutored, and consequently felt on the outskirts of the family. My sisters, Henriette and Carolyn, who showed an early talent for painting, were brought very quickly into the studio by my father. I was almost forgotten. So I played alone and wandered a great deal over the hills, painting watercolors that literally exploded, slapdash over my pages, and drew in pencil or pen and ink in a wild and undisciplined manner. My earliest things were landscapes, hills near our house, romantic images of medieval castles, knights in armor, and a lot of drawings of doughboys, soldiers of the First World War because I was just fascinated by a collection of lead soldiers I had of that period. My father did see the work, but casually. I wasn’t exactly ignored, it was just that I wasn’t focused in upon like the rest of the family. Then, one evening, when I was about fifteen, I showed my father a miniature scenery and the lake and told him about a playlet I had written- at that time, I was much influenced by Shakespeare, as I am to this day- and he looked at it, rather casually I thought at the time. But offhand, he said, ‘Andy next week I want you to come up to the studio, draw from casts, and get started in academic training.’”
As Andrew described his early work, he incorporated isolation as a code of representation that defined American realist painting in the 1930s and 1940s. When he first displayed his work in the mid-1930s, one of the most turbulent periods in American art history, there were heated debates about art and politics, abstraction, and figuration. Art historians and museum curators have tried to place Wyeth within the mainstream of American modernism, but he remained stubbornly resistant, preferring to present himself as a reclusive outsider as he was immune to the artistic practices. In the 1940s, he cultivated the romantic notion that he was a loner seeking inspiration only from the landscape and people of Chadds Ford and the surrounding Pennsylvania countryside.
At the Art Alliance in Philadelphia, he was included in a group exhibition entitled The Wyeth Family in 1935. It focused on Andrew’s father, N.C. Wyeth, an accomplished painter, muralist, and illustrator, and Andrew’s older sister, Henriette, hailed as,
“one of the most brilliant of the younger generation of American artists.”
Now, that we know a little early life of Andrew, let us start learning about the historical context of the artwork, Christina’s World.
Historical Provenance of Christina World’s Painting.
Wyeth spent the entire summer of 1948 painting Christina’s World. However, the idea of painting this composition was triggered in May when Andrew was looking out from a third-floor window of the Olson house and saw Christina, dragging herself across the grass. Christina had a gradual, never-diagnosed muscular deterioration, which left her lower body helpless. On that particular day, she was labouriously returning from the tiny garden where she tended to the flowers that decorated the lower rooms. I will tell you more about Christina and her relevance, with the artist later in this section itself.
At the end of that afternoon, Wyeth rowed his dory to Thomaston, Maine, from Hathorn Point, a half-mile up the St. George River estuary. It stirred his imagination to see Christina crawling along the New England shore, like a crab. Wyeth explains,
“Sometimes I think I’m not very artistic because people will say, ‘Did you notice the amazing sulfur yellow in the sky, the way it…’ That stuff never strikes me to paint. It’s got to click with something I’m already thinking about. Then my hair rises on the back of my neck. I get goose pimples.”
That same evening, he and his wife (Betsy) joined a dinner party, given by Betsy’s parents, Bess and Merle James. During the meal, Andrew suddenly left his house to reach his bedroom. On the first piece of paper, that came to his hand, he started sketching with his few swirling pencil strokes to make a first sketch of Christina’s World painting. He once explained,
“If you leave something nebulous in your mind… I hunt for it with purely an abstract line. I have to get the essence down as quickly as possible before it goes.”
From that day, he worked on the painting at the Hathorn Point or the Olson house, till it was completed. During his work at the Oslon house on Christina’s World, the tempera, the house, the brother and sister all merged in his mind. Taking note of how tone, odor, and mood can influence a person’s mood, he felt that
“the panel began to inhale through its pores the quality of the room- just as Christina and Al smelled like the house.”
Who was Christina Olson?
Now, let me tell you all about Christina so that you find relevance to the painting. Anna Christina Olson was born in 1893 to Katie and a young Swedish sailor, John Olson. She was named after her Swedish grandmother. Her father, John, was crippled by arthritis and spent his last fifteen years in a wheelchair, tended by Christina and Al. When he died in 1935, they stayed in his house. Though she suffered from a muscular deformity, she rejected her father’s wheelchair as the symbol of arthritis. It was Al who rolled it down the steep hill of the river as Christina refused to submit to her disability. Only Al helped her. When the plaster of the dining room fell, one of the relatives says,
“We went down and got some wallpaper and kind of plastered over the walls so that in the wintertime it wouldn’t be so cold. She really didn’t want us to do it, but we went in and did it just the same. But she didn’t move out of the way. The funny part of it is, you couldn’t move Christina out of the way. If she sat there, you got to walk over her.”
When Andrew first arrived at the Olson’s, time and forced neglect had been doing its work. Christina’s lameness caused her to spend most of her days in the kitchen chair. As a result of being pushed across the floor to the stove, the chair’s legs were worn down short. Her arms assisted her in pulling herself to another room by lowering her body to the ground. Her stoicism and independence never allowed her to accept help- even crutches or a wheelchair. Of course, Alvaro stopped doing what he loved to do and quietly took care of his sister as best he could.
Friendship Between Christina Olson and Andrew Wyeth.
Christina and Wyeth had a wonderful friendship, and Wyeth visited her constantly. A self-sufficient survivor, she conquered pain and humiliation with self-sufficient strength and calm, owing no allegiance to anyone. In Wyeth’s eyes, she represented everything that was best about Maine. He once said about her,
“When you get next to something as mammoth as she is, the grime and slight things evaporate, and you see before you the queen of Sweden sitting there, looking at you. Small minds pick up a speck of dirt on her leg and are clouded by that. She’s fabulous for me. Puts me right back on my knees.”
Completing the Artwork, Christina’s World.
After Christina’s World painting was completed, Wyeth hung it over his sofa. A few weeks later, when Christina and Al came to dinner at his house, Al set her down on the sofa, where she could not see the painting above her head. The entire dinner didn’t bring up the painting’s conversation once, but later, for a moment, when Wyeth and Christina were alone, he asked her how she liked it, and she simply responded by drawing fingers to her lips. Christina’s World remained on this wall, but visitors hardly glanced at it, so depressed Andrew shipped it to the Macbeth Gallery in New York. However, the painting impressed MoMA, and in December, the artist received a cheque from the gallery for $1400 (sold for $1800). At the end of December 1948, this picture was hung by MoMA in its show titled, American Paintings From the Museum Collection.
In 1982, Betsy produced a book on Olson’s, titled Christina’s World, with her new helper, Patty Ralston. Then she also produced Snow Hill, a 60-minute documentary on Wyeth in 1995, which won CINE Golden Eagle and an Oscar for educational film.
Last but not least, Andrew Wyeth had developed his mature style by 1948, when Christina’s World painting was finished, and he had closed his art to outside influences. His style had regularly evolved, influenced by the work of other artists and experimenting with a variety of aesthetic approaches before this point. For most of his best-known paintings, Wyeth has withdrawn from the contemporary art world and delved into his own life and art for subject matter, continually refining their heightened symbolic qualities and sentient qualities. As a result of this process, his art underwent intriguing stylistic transformations that would not be apparent to a viewer looking at it strictly chronologically. The development of Wyeth’s three themes illustrates these changes, revealing his art’s uncanny sense of animation.
Understanding Christina’s World Meaning.
Wyeth normally created a protected world in his artwork, which is filled with non-threatening objects on which he can project his own thoughts. The artist retains a sense of emotion and intelligence in inanimate objects to the extent that he can imagine inhabiting them; conversely, he can discern inanimate characteristics in humans. By animating insensate objects, he defies the laws of nature by exploring complex and difficult feelings, developing inchoate ideas, and formulating and solving questions related to temporary, embodiment, and the metaphysical in a safe, fictional realm. As a result, he creates an iconography that is distinctively personal and identifies with objects.
The painting is more than an illustration because not only does it tell about her physical condition and emotional environment, but it also addresses the evolution of Wyeth’s career with his private language of metaphor. Wyeth met his future wife, Betsy, in Maine in 1939, and that same day, she took him to meet his neighbors, the siblings Christina and Alvaro Olson, thus beginning a significant relationship. Now, we know about Christina that she was disabled and refused to take any help. Wyeth viewed the Olson house as a time capsule from another era as if it had never changed and still represented old England. They hail from New England Lineage that dates back to the seventeenth century when one of their ancestors presided over the Salem witch trials. Hence, to Wyeth, Christina was
“a symbol of New England people in the past- as they really were.”
Wyeth eliminated a lot of components from the actual landscape, like the farm buildings, and distorted the space between the house and the barn. Also, the slope of the hill was Wyeth’s invention. Since the painting originated in the artist’s imagination, it is also the image of the artist’s mind and a personal projection. He writes,
“I felt the loneliness of that figure- perhaps the same that I felt myself as a kid.”
Previously, I explained how Andrew was neglected at first among his siblings and that he didn’t join school which might have alienated him from the rest of the world. He saw this isolation in this painting also. Certain elements of Christina’s World painting like the lone figure, brown grassy hill, tire tracks, and high horizon line contribute to isolation in this artwork. Hence, the painting also has an autobiographical relevance here. Furthermore, according to Christopher Crosman, Christina’s World also represents the grief about N.C. Wyeth’s death (N.C. Wyeth died in 1945). Hence, it not only suggests the artist’s nostalgia for the old New England but also resonates with his incessant longing for his father.
The Symbolism of Christina’s World.
The painting, Christina’s World, depicts a lone figure in a grassy field, viewed from slightly below the uncluttered horizon line. It does have the elimination of superfluous anecdotal details. In Christina’s World, Betsy’s thin figure is used as a model for the figure’s gnarled, whereas the misshapen hands and arms were modeled after Christina Olson’s limbs damaged by an ailment. Betsy recalls crawling repetitively across the living room floor in Cushing to make sure Andrew could get the motion right. Wyeth cared more about emotional and psychological truth than a physical likeness.
Wyeth tried to evoke hope and despair, endurance and fragility, closeness and distance, intimacy and anonymity, age and youth to transform his young wife into Christina Olson. Hence, the painting is pure fiction in many ways; the placement of the figure on the hill the absence of farming implements, and the absence of tire marks on the field. Yet, the painting remains true to Andrew’s feelings through emotional stir.
Now that you know about the painting’s history, let us finally move to the formal analysis.
Subject Matter.
The artwork portrays Christina sitting on the grass as she supports her upper body with her arms that are scrawny in appearance. Wearing a light pink dress, and brown shoes, Andrew paints her hair as a dark brunette with a neatly secured bun. As she lifts her head up to look towards her home, several strands of her hair gently billow the wind.
In the foreground, there are two homes, one placed in the right corner with a fenced-off area is Olson’s house, whereas to the left of the house is a barn. There are two curvy parallel lines in the grass, symbolizing a driveway. The entire painting demonstrates isolation through an emptiness. Around the barn and house, there is a section of grass that appears cut or mowed shorter, making it easier to distinguish between the long grass in the foreground and the grass surrounding Christina.
Formally Analyzing Christina’s World by Andrew Wyeth.
1. Line.
Andrew Wyeth used a horizontal line to establish a distant appearance in the composition to separate the sky from the land. A line created from shorter grass strands provided further depth to the horizontal line. There are diagonal lines in the driveway to the right of the composition, offset to the vertical lines of the garden poles and structure of the house. Christina’s body is also in a diagonal angle, which showcases an emotional stir and sense of motion in the painting. Furthermore, this profusion of lines adds a perspective to the scene that Christina is seeing way forward towards her house.
2. Shape.
Christina’s World mainly consists of geometric and angular shapes, notably square, rectangular, and triangular forms, derived from the house and barn. Christina’s figure shows organic forms and a square shape created by the fenced-off area in front of the house. Even the parallel driveway is infinite quadrilateral in shape. The rigidity of the distant buildings and the dull colors conjure up an image of rural America that seems nostalgic.
3. Color.
Andrew used a dull and muted color palette with hues of grass, yellows, gray, and brown shades. The only color that stands out in this country house palette is Christina’s pink dress, which symbolizes her carefree nature and spirit of living a prideful life. Christina’s use of blue sky conveys hope, yet it is muted, so it does not overwhelm. Additionally, Wyeth evokes sympathy and concern in the viewer by showing Christina’s unable-to-walk state. As she reaches out to drag herself up the hill, the shadows on her arms remind us of her solitary battle and endurance.
Final Words.
As an artwork, Christina’s World tells more than the story of Christina Olson and the artist, as it also represents the empty phase of our lives when we need someone to pull us out of the shadows. Andrew rightly displayed the emotions and sensibility of emptiness through a fine perspective, muted shades of colors, and a profusion of diagonal lines. Though he represented the emotional stir of the painting, at the same time, he showed Christina’s delicacy of spirit.
Frequently Asked Questions.
Andrew Wyeth painted Christina’s World in 1948. The painting portrays the emptiness and loneliness of Christina Olson alongside the artist’s mind.
There is no information about the worth of Christina’s World today and it is not on sale. Nevertheless, it was sold to the Museum of Modern Art for $1800 the same year it was painted.
The Museum of Modern Art, USA, exhibits Christina’s World. Portraying Christina from her back on the grass of a field, the artist fills this painting with a psychological and emotional stir.
Resources.
- Andrew Wyeth: A Secret Life by Richard Meryman.
- Andrew Wyeth: Memory and Magic by Anne Classen Knutson.
- Two Worlds of Andrew Wyeth: A Conversation With Andrew Wyeth By Andrew Wyeth.
- Andrew Wyeth by Richard Meryman.
- Featured Image: Christina’s World by Andrew Wyeth, via MoMA.
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