Christina's World: Meaning and the Real Christina
Christina's World is a 1948 painting by Andrew Wyeth, in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. A woman in a pink dress lies in a vast field, propped on thin arms, gazing up at a weathered farmhouse on the horizon.
She looks like a young woman resting. She was in fact a woman of fifty six who could not walk, dragging herself home across the grass.
It is one of the best known American paintings, and one of the most quietly unsettling. Here is who the real Christina was, why she is crawling, and what the picture actually means.
Who Christina really was
Her name was Christina Olson, and she lived on a farm in Cushing, Maine, near where Wyeth spent his summers. She was not the slim young woman she appears from behind. When Wyeth painted this she was in her mid fifties.
From childhood Christina had a degenerative condition that slowly took the use of her legs. Doctors never firmly diagnosed it in her lifetime; today it is often suspected to have been a form of the nerve disease Charcot Marie Tooth.
She refused a wheelchair her whole life. To get around her land she pulled herself along the ground with her arms, and that is exactly what Wyeth painted: not a girl daydreaming in a meadow, but a disabled woman making the long, hard journey back to her house on her own terms.
The moment he saw from a window
Wyeth got the idea directly from life. From an upstairs window of the Olson farmhouse, which he used as a studio, he watched Christina hauling herself across the wide field, a sight he found unforgettable.
He did not, though, use her body for the picture. Christina was in her fifties and frail, so for the figure and the young looking arms Wyeth posed his own wife, Betsy, who was then in her twenties.
Christina's actual head and hands were studied from her, but the lithe body is Betsy's. The painting fuses the two: the youthful form of the artist's wife and the real face and will of the woman who could not walk.
What Christina's World means
On the surface it is a portrait of a specific disabled woman and her home. Underneath, Wyeth meant it as a tribute to her spirit.
He said the challenge was to do justice to her extraordinary conquest of a life that most people would have found hopeless, and that if the picture worked, you would feel her limitless world despite her limits.
That is the tension I feel every time, without quite being able to name it. The field is enormous, the sky wide, the house far away, and she is small and low and alone in it.
It can read as longing, as isolation, as sheer determination, and Wyeth left room for all of them. His plain, dry Realism makes the strangeness sit quietly, which is why the picture unnerves as much as it moves.
Painted in egg and dust
The dry, matte, almost photographic surface is not oil. Wyeth painted Christina's World in tempera, pigment mixed with egg yolk, an ancient and painstaking medium that dries fast and flat and lets you build a field blade of grass by blade of grass.
It suits the subject perfectly. Tempera has no gloss and no drama; it is patient, muted and exact, the visual equivalent of Christina's slow crawl.
Wyeth spent months on the grass alone, and the effort of the technique mirrors the effort in the scene.
For decades in a MoMA corridor
Christina's World is in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which bought it in 1948, soon after it was painted, for eighteen hundred dollars.
It is now considered beyond price and effectively impossible to insure for travel, so it very rarely leaves the building. For decades it hung, almost casually, in a corridor near the escalators, watched by millions of passing visitors, a national treasure treated like a familiar face on the wall.
The house that became a landmark
The Olson farmhouse in Cushing, Maine, is now a National Historic Landmark, one of very few in the country given that status for a painting rather than an event.
Wyeth painted the Olsons and their weathered house for nearly thirty years, using an upstairs room as a studio, and kept coming back long after this picture made him famous.
When her brother Alvaro died on Christmas night 1967, and Christina about a month later in early 1968, Wyeth said he felt he had lost his whole subject. He is buried in the family plot within sight of the house, which is open to visitors today.
The picture the critics filed under kitsch
MoMA bought Christina's World quietly in 1948, and for years it drew little notice and no prize. The art world of the time was turning to abstraction, and it dismissed Wyeth as sentimental and old fashioned, a maker of calendar pictures, precisely because he painted a recognisable rural America.
The public never agreed. Reproductions sold in the millions, and the picture the critics filed under kitsch became one of the two or three most familiar American paintings of the century.
It is, to me, the clearest case in modern art of the audience being right and the experts being slow.
A family that painted for three generations
Andrew Wyeth did not come from nowhere. His father was N.C. Wyeth, the most famous book illustrator in America, who taught him at home and drilled him in draftsmanship before letting him near paint.
When N.C. was killed at a railway crossing in 1945, the grief pushed Andrew toward the bare, still, haunted pictures that Christina's World belongs to.
The line ran on. Andrew's son Jamie Wyeth became a noted painter in turn, making the Wyeths a rare three generation dynasty in American art.
Christina's World sits right in the middle of that story, the son proving, three years after his father's death, that he could hold a wall on his own.
Christina's World, quick answers
What is the meaning behind Christina's World? It honors a disabled woman's determination. She cannot walk and drags herself home across a huge field, and Wyeth meant it as a tribute to her spirit rather than a scene of pity.
Who is the real person in Christina's World? Christina Olson, a woman from Cushing, Maine, in her mid fifties, who had lost the use of her legs. Wyeth's wife Betsy posed for the body.
Why is she lying in the field? She could not walk and refused a wheelchair, so she moved by pulling herself along the ground with her arms. Wyeth saw her do it from a window.
Who painted it and when? Andrew Wyeth, in 1948, in tempera.
Where is Christina's World? The Museum of Modern Art in New York.
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The house is still there
Christina Olson died in 1968 and is buried in the small family plot near her farmhouse in Cushing, Maine, the same ground Wyeth himself would later be buried in.
The house itself still stands and is open to visitors as a museum, and you can look out of the same upstairs window Wyeth used and see the field she crossed.
Wyeth was spurned for decades by critics who dismissed his careful realism as old fashioned, yet the picture they sneered at has outlasted most of the art that was fashionable when it was made.
You can see Christina World in person at the Museum of Modern Art. For more by the artist, browse the Metropolitan Museum collection.
Questions across the field
Who is Christina? Christina Olson, a neighbour of the painter in Maine. A condition that had weakened her legs since youth left her unable to walk, so she moved by pulling herself along the ground.
What does the painting show? Christina in a pale field, propped on her arms, gazing up toward a distant grey farmhouse.
Where is the house? It is the real Olson House in Cushing, Maine, now open to visitors.
Where is the painting? It hangs in the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Who painted it? Andrew Wyeth, in 1948. He was struck by the sight of Christina crossing the field alone.