ART CRITICISM: Christina's World

The artwork I am going to analyse in this second art review is Christina’s World, by the American artist Andrew Wyeth, who was primarily a realist painter. It is a tempera on panel which measures 81,9 cm by 121,3 cm. It was painted in 1948 and hangs currently in the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), in New York. This is the most famous painting created by Wyeth, and one of the most important and known artistic icons of XXth century (along with American Gothic, by Grant Wood). Wyeth’s favourite subjects were the lands where he lived and their people, especially his hometown, Chadds Ford (Pennsylvania), and his summer home in the Mid Coast of Maine. This painting, set in this second geographic location, depicts an ageless girl, Christina, lying on a bare field. A vast area of the grass, surrounding the house is cut. The girl, leant back among the grown grass, is looking at an old house and other adjacent buildings, such as a barn, in the distance.

In his works, Wyeth sought to depict even the tiniest details. In this painting, he rendered every single blade of grass and every single strad of Christina’s hair. He used a muted colour range, and earth colours are predominant. The subject matter is connected with the interests of the painters joined under the umbrella term American Scene (American Regionalism and Social Realism), who wanted to record the American essence by depicting scenes of typical American life in a naturalistic, descriptive style. It does not mean that these artists were an organised movement. However they all stressed the idea of creating an American style of art, moving away from abstraction and the avant-gard which were developing in Europe in the meanwhile. In Christina’s World the quotidian scene is imbued with a poetic mystery (the loneliness of the girl, and the distance between her and the house suggest an imagined or dreamed reality), which is a trail of Magical Realism.

I feel that this picture conveys a sense of nostalgia, perhaps about a lost childhood. It is important here to take into account that I see a little girl in the painting (or, at least, an ageless girl), even though the real Christina was likely to be a grown woman by the time the work was painted. However, there seems to be a story of disease behind the image. Christina Olson, a Wyeth’s neighbour in Maine, had undergone a disease which made her suffer from muscular dystrophy (see Christina’s fingers and elbow). This is the reason why, although it is easy to think that she is lying in a relaxed way, she could be actually crawling through the grass. The success of this work of art might have been due to the fact that we all know sorrow, and we all have things to recover from, like Christina. And this sorrow often implies early maturity, but also the desire to never grow up. But as it is written above, before I knew about this story, I thought it was an image about the wistfulness hidden in who we were. Because Christina’s nostalgia (and my own nostalgia) is not about leaving, but rather about returning to find that things that we care about have changed: ourselves, our family, our chilhood home, our hometown.

When you encounter an artwork like this, a major question comes up: How can I approach an icon of a nation and a period? I believe, maybe in a too romanticised sense, that the most sensitive and thought-provoking painters are those who take a simple or quotidian moment and turn it into an eternal thing, thus attaining a reconciliation between the eternity and our lives. Andrew Wyeth accomplished this goal in Christina’s World. I think this is one of the reasons this evocative painting is so powerful, and has become such a symbol.

Best regards,

Jacobo González

An example of the popularity of Christina’s World: