"Christina's World” a 1948 work painted by Andrew Wyeth it depicts a young woman seen from behind, wearing a pink dress and lying in a grassy field. Although she appears in a position of repose, her torso, resting on her arms, is strangely alert; her silhouette is tense, almost frozen, giving the impression of being fixed to the ground. He stares at a distant farmhouse and a cluster of outbuildings, ancient and gray in harmony with the dry grass and overcast sky. The work is in the MoMA collections.
Andrew Wyeth was born in the United States in 1917. He is spoken of as a realist painter, a realist to the point that he was nicknamed the "painter of the people". He learned to draw from a very young age, when his father who was an illustrator took him with him in his studio. The young man soon mastered the art of painting. At the age of twenty he held his first exhibition at New York and sold all his works. With a cordial character, he loved to chat with the peasants, with the shopkeepers and the children running down the street, and no one could already say that he wasn't capable of painting. When John F. Kennedy he was elected president of the United States he invited several artists to the ceremony, including Wyeth, who however declined the invitation because he had a painting to finish. The following year he was again invited to the White House, and this time he went. Kennedy said "I'm happy that – then – you worked on that painting” – he had seen it exhibited in an exhibition – “The result, he deserved it".
Wyeth often enjoyed being in his studio, even though he split the time between his summer home in Maine and his winter home in Pennsylvania, believed that his homes were more than enough to inspire him and found it superfluous to look elsewhere for new stimuli. He said to his wife "I haven't yet thoroughly examined my surroundings, why shouldn't I stay where I am and dig a little more?”
His art encompassed the everyday life of his characters, immersed as they were in that environmental context where the figure emerges in all its emotional form. A realist painting, which already in the 60s received all the favor of connoisseurs and laymen. But calling him a pure realist was like blaming him, because he didn't limit himself to reproducing what he saw. On the contrary!
It may be that one of your paintings represents a barn, but are we sure it is a barn? Let's say it looks like a barn that collects the life that surrounds it around a movement, a feeling full of emotions.
They often commissioned him works inviting him to go and see a valley rather than a mountain, but he refused, "It will be a beautiful place, but I need to feel it". And it is for this quality that he denies abstractionism as a supreme artistic expression. “I like abstractions up to a certain point, I like their dynamism, their ferment, but I'll stop there". He said!
In his most famous painting he portrays a frail woman lying in a meadow, a woman looking at an old wooden house on top of the hill. She is Christina Olson, a polio survivor and her next-door neighbor in Maine. The picture was born because one day Wyeth looked out the window and saw the girl on her grass with a soft pink dress that wrapped her around, and something shook him to the point of wanting to paint her. For him that wasChristine's world”…and nothing else.
One day they offered him to buy an old mill – it was the one where wheat was ground for the soldiers of George Washington – he liked it so much that he decided to buy it and restore it. Gradually, with infinite care, it became his favorite studio as well as a fine old mill. There were no carpets on the stone floor, no curtains on the windows, no flowers on the tables, yet it was all of great charm and warmth. He lived not in the midst of fake things, but in the midst of everyday realities that he reconstructs in his paintings with extreme simplicity. His attitude towards art is a rare humility. While he takes his art seriously, he never takes himself seriously.
