Word: christinaity
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...Even when Wyeth is admitted into the canon, he's held a bit at arm's length. The Museum of Modern Art in New York City owns his most famous canvas, Christina's World, which it acquired in 1948, soon after it was painted, for just $1,800. But while the picture is always on display at MoMA, it's consigned to what you might call an anteroom on the margins of the more respectably modern galleries, a salon des refuses that it shares with Edward Hopper's House by the Railroad. Seeing Christina splayed across her field of grass...
...Christina, who is crippled by polio, is one of Wyeth's few close friends. He judges people by their reactions to her. "I don't take some people to see her," says Wyeth, "because they won't understand." He fears that they will find her grotesque. Christina's house contains the anonymous leavings of years of confinement. The smell of burning oil, charred wood, fat cats and old cloth fills the air. Christina, now nearing 70, does not let anyone see how she moves about, stubbornly refuses to use a wheelchair. "Andy's a very...
None of Wyeth's portraits of Christina look alike; the artist injects his own humanity into the people and places around him. More than anything else that Wyeth paints, Christina's individuality and inner strength are a mirror-portrait of the artist himself. She is a touchstone of his compassion...
...Brown Swiss, a skyless 1957 landscape titled for the breed of cows crossing it, Wyeth blithely eliminated the cows. Instead, he showed narrow cow paths like the creases of a worried century across the brown brow of a hillside. Nowadays, he feels that he could even have removed Christina from Christina's World and still have conveyed the same sense of loneliness...
...give me goose pimples," he says. His flesh crawls at odd moments. In Wind from the Sea Wyeth opens an upstairs window in Christina Olson's house in a room that has been closed for years, and the billowing of lace curtains lets in a sudden puff of salty air. Wyeth is moved. Abruptly glimpsing his own reflection in a dusty mirror leads to an unexpected 1949 self-portrait, The Revenant, where he stands perplexed and unbalanced in an abandoned room. The amber glass ball on a lightning rod in Northern Point looks to him "as if it were...