Christina's World at MoMA

Andrew Wyeth's painting Christina's World, held at MoMA, is one of the most recognizable and beloved American artworks of the 20th century. So we were surprised to learn, upon Wyeth's recent death, that he was considered controversial, largely because he offered a realist counterpoint to an era dominated by abstraction. Seeing Christina's World (1948) again makes it easy to understand how abstract expressionists could have loathed its precision and clarity, as well as its total commitment to plausible details, like the individual boards on the barn in the background and the shadow of the ladder falling across the house.

What's harder to see is how the public ever embraced such a bleak painting, how it is that this image has come to hang in cubicles and dorm rooms. The paralyzed Christina looks toward the house seemingly as a longed-for destination, but her twisted body and the ambivalence of her arms (the right one pushing her toward the house, the left pushing her away) suggest that she could be on the verge of turning toward the viewer just as easily as she could be crawling home. And no wonder, given the derelict state of the house: its overgrown grass and uneven shades make it look uninhabited --- even the bats are fleeing the barn --- but the lonely, torn piece of clothing hanging on the line hints that someone is scraping out a desperate life here.