Andrew Wyeth: Christina's World

In 1947 Andrew Wyeth produced what would become one of the most iconic paintings in American art: a desolate landscape depicting a single figure, which he called Christina's World. The woman in the painting, Christina Olson, lived in Cushing, Maine, where Wyeth and his wife kept a summer house. She suffered from polio, and was paralyzed from the waist down; Wyeth was moved to portray her when he saw her one day crawling through the field towards her house. Christina's World became one of the most simultaneously well-loved and scorned works of the twentieth century, igniting heated arguments about parochialism, sentimentality, kitsch, and elitism that have continued to absorb the art world, long after the artist's death in 2009. An essay by curator Laura Hoptman revisits the genesis of the painting, discussing Wyeth's curious focus, over the course of his career, on a deliberately delimited range of subjects, and exploring the mystery that continues to surround the enigmatic painting.