Christina's World

Andrew Wyeth, 1948 · Gallery 521 · Floor 5

So... he saw her from inside that house. The one up the hill. It's 1948. Andrew Wyeth's upstairs in a farmhouse in Maine, using one of the rooms as a studio. He looks out the window. Down in the field, a woman's pulling herself through the grass. Using her arms. That's Christina Olson. She's fifty-five. The house belongs to her and her brother. She hasn't walked in years. Won't use a wheelchair. This is how she gets around the farm. And Wyeth knows her. He's been coming here for almost a decade. But when he paints this, he moves us. Down into the grass, behind her. Now we're looking up at the house he was looking out of. And he puts more field between her and home. And then there's Christina herself. The hands are hers. The thin arms. That pink dress. But his wife, Betsy, poses for the torso. She's twenty-six. Betsy gives it the name, too. Christina's World. He paints it in egg tempera. That's color mixed with egg yolk. All that grass, worked over in tiny strokes. Meanwhile, Pollock's got a canvas on the floor, pouring paint, and Wyeth's over here doing this. And when he finishes, he isn't sure it's any good. He later remembers thinking it was a flat tire. Then it goes to his dealer in New York. MoMA buys it. Eighteen hundred dollars. That flat tire becomes one of the best-known paintings in America. Wyeth becomes enormously popular. The critics aren't all buying it. One of them says, "He can't paint." Christina has a different complaint. Her face isn't in it. But according to Betsy, she also says, "Andy put me where I wanted to be." Christina dies in January 1968. Her brother had died the month before. Wyeth lives another forty-one years. When he dies in 2009, he's buried in the Olsons' little family cemetery. Down the hill from that house. With Christina.

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