Against the wall of landscape that leads up to her house, the crippled body of an ageless woman seems trapped, imprisoned by the very emptiness of the earth. One of them, Christina’s World, now 15 years old, is one of the most durable and disquieting images of 20th century America. He has painted eight temperas of her or her house, a decrepit three-story clapboard pile atop a knoll near the Maine seacoast. The most famous of these is a woman named Christina Olson. TIME Magazine, however, had a different take on the painting in a cover story on Wyeth in 1963, calling the work, “One of the most durable and disquieting images of 20th century America,” and explaining the story behind the picture: I thought, ‘Boy, is this one ever a flat tire.'” Of his most famous painting, which now hangs in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Wyeth said, “When I first painted it in 1948, Christina’s World hung all summer in my house in Maine and nobody particularly reacted to it. LIFE would feature Wyeth, who died in 2009, and his paintings many times over the years, including extensive articles in 1953 and a 1965 profile that featured 22 pages of his favorite paintings and a first-person interview by Richard Meryman, who became a good friend of Wyeth’s and went on to write a biography of the painter.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |