Word: christinas
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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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...
...more astringent and cooler. His portraits too. The people in those portraits are known to him. Most of them are family, like his son Jamie, who also became an artist, or neighbors like Karl and Anna Kuerner, a German-American couple he painted many times in Chadds Ford, and Christina Olson, the crippled woman in Christina's World whom he knew from around his summer home in Cushing, Maine. But though these people are his familiars, they look to us enclosed, subdued, even solemn, always keeping something of themselves to themselves...
...something to do with a mood of almost palpable quiet - the quiet you find so often in Hopper, but without Hopper's way of making sunlight unnerving or that little thrill of voyeurism that Hopper liked to provide. Wyeth's people may not be looking back at you, but, Christina's World aside, you rarely get the feeling they're being watched unawares...
...Helga. It's all those other quiet, elusive canvases that will stay with us. The canons of art history have loosened quite a bit in recent decades, enough so that no full picture of the modern world can exclude what he did. Who knows? Someday MoMA may even bring Christina all the way in from the cold...
...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...