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Introduction...
Christina's World is a 1948 painting by American painter Andrew Wyeth and one of the best-known American paintings of the middle 20th century.
It is a tempera work done in a realist style, depicting a woman semi-reclining on the ground in a treeless, mostly tawny field, looking up at a gray house on the horizon; a barn and various other small outbuildings are adjacent to the house.
It is owned by the Museum of Modern Art in New York as part of its permanent collection.
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Background...
The woman in the painting is Anna Christina Olson (May 3, 1893 – January 27, 1968). Anna had a degenerative muscular disorder which meant that she had not been able to walk since she was about 30 years old.[2] She was firmly against using a wheelchair, so she would crawl everywhere. Wyeth was inspired to create the painting when he saw her crawling across a field while he was watching from a window in the house.He had a summer home in the area and was on friendly terms with Olson.
but she was not the primary model; Wyeth's wife Betsy posed as the torso of the painting.
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Overview...
- Although she appears to be in a position of repose, her torso, propped on her arms, is strangely alert; her silhouette is tense, almost frozen, giving the impression that she is fixed to the ground.
- She stares at a distant farmhouse and a group of outbuildings, which gives an impression to be longing to be home.
- She refused to use a wheelchair, preferring to crawl, as depicted here, using her arms to drag her lower body along. “The challenge to me,” Wyeth explained, “was to do justice to her extraordinary conquest of a life which most people would consider hopeless.”
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Conclusion...
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.
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CURATED BY
CURATOR'S NOTE
one of the most inspiring painting of all times....
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