Christina's World
Original title: Christina's World
Date: 1948
Art Form: Painting
Dimensions: 81.9 X 121.3 cm (32.24 X 47.76 in)
With her back to the viewer, Wyeth's subject Anna Christina Olson stares into the distance, looking out at her farmhouse in Cushing, Maine. Suffering from a degenerative muscular disease, Christina was unable to walk. Wyeth said that she was "limited physically but by no means spiritually" and that "the challenge was to do justice to her extraordinary conquest of a life which most people would consider hopeless." Her gaunt arms and legs and her slight frame make the figure seem vulnerable and isolated in the expansive field, and the viewer is put in an ambiguous position, looking at her from behind. The scene contains a sense of vulnerability, contributing to a certain foreboding feeling.
To say this is a true portrait of Christina Olson, though, would be misleading. While the pink dress and slim limbs belong to the then 55-year-old Olson, Wyeth used his young wife Betsy as the actual model here, thus fusing Christina's aging and abnormal body with that of a healthy, young one. Even though Wyeth wanted to depict Olson's plight, it can be interpreted that Wyeth made the subject an "Everywoman".
Christina's World presents an intriguing, open-ended narrative that appeals to the imagination. Who is Christina? Why is she in a field? Is that her house? Why does she seem to be crawling? The profundity that Wyeth was able to capture in this painting makes it one of the most well-known and admired pieces that the artist ever produced; however, it was not his personal favorite. Wyeth felt that the painting would have been more successful without the figure in the field. He remarked to an interviewer, "When I was painting Christina's World I would sit there by the hours working on the grass, and I began to feel I was really out in the field. I got lost in the texture of the thing. I remember going down into the field and grabbing up a section of earth and setting it on the base of my easel. It wasn't a painting I was working on. I was actually working on the ground itself."
The high level of detail Wyeth gave to every object in his paintings encourages intense inspection, but his titles reveal the inner significance of their outwardly straightforward subjects. The title Christina’s World, courtesy of Wyeth’s wife, indicates that the painting is more a psychological landscape than a portrait, a portrayal of a state of mind rather than a place.
