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Fragile, yet Strong
CREATING a homey corner
If you grew up surrounded by fieldstone houses and rolling hills but live in a different environment now, create a corner to celebrate your memories à la Andrew Wyeth. Wyeth lived in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, a classic Ameri
can farming community. Many of the buildings were created from the abundant fieldstone, heavily influenced by the Quaker population. Even though his most well known painting was Christina's World, created in Maine, his childhood was surrounded by fieldstone and verdant hills in Pennsylvania.
When the artist saw an unusual house in Iowa with an upper window with pointed arches usually found in churches, he was inspired to paint this picture with the kind of people he imagined would live inside.
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Christina's World, Andrew Wyeth Christina's World is a 1948 painting by American painter Andrew Wyeth and one of the best-known American paintings of the middle 20th century. It is a tempera work done in a realist style, depicting a woman semi-reclining on the ground in a treeless, mostly tawny field, looking up at a gray house on the horizon; a barn and various other small outbuildings are adjacent to the house. It is owned by the Museum of Modern Art in New York as part of its permanent collection. In 1948, the Museum of Modern Art bought the painting “Christina’s World” from the artist Andrew Wyeth for $1,800. Along with Andy Warhol’s “Campbell’s Soup Cans” and Vincent van Gogh’s “The Starry Night,” it is one of MoMA’s most enduringly popular paintings. It has been more than 20 years since it was loaned out for special exhibitions. MoMA has denied recent requests from Wyeth museums (the Brandywine in Chadds Ford, Pa., and the Farnsworth in Rockland, Maine), saying that it is too fragile to travel. I recently went to the newly renovated MoMA and discovered that “Christina’s World” has vanished. Ann Temkin, the chief curator of painting and sculpture at MoMA, said the museum has expanded its collection and had taken many works out of rotation, including “Christina’s World.” She said it would be brought back “within 2020.” A museum can do as it chooses with its acquisitions. But “Christina’s World” is one of the most iconic American paintings of the 20th century. Like Leonardo da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa” and Johannes Vermeer’s “Girl with a Pearl Earring,” it has been reproduced on postage stamps, mugs, and posters. It is referenced in political commentary, TV, and movies, from “The Simpsons” to “Forrest Gump” to New Yorker cartoons, and memes, and has influenced countless artists, writers, poets, and songwriters. The painting will never be appreciated at a place like MoMA, where its broad appeal is confirmation that it’s little more than sentimental kitsch. Having fallen out of favor in the 1960s with the rise of Pop Art, Abstract Expressionism, and Minimalism, it is still, in certain highbrow circles, considered embarrassingly uncool. Wyeth’s style has been largely misunderstood, as many art historians and critics now acknowledge. According to the art historian Wanda M. Corn, in a recent collection of critical and scholarly essays, “Rethinking Andrew Wyeth,” his style was forged in the 1930s and ’40s under the intertwined influences of American regionalism and figurative surrealism. (In his work you can see allusions to both the 19th-century Philadelphia realist painter Thomas Eakins and the 20th-century Belgian Surrealist artist Magritte.) Corn describes Wyeth’s style as a form of “metaphoric realism,” in which the ordinary is heightened to reveal qualities of fundamental human existence. “Magic!” Wyeth once said. “It’s what makes things sublime. It’s the difference between a picture that is profound art and just a painting of an object.” I spent several years immersed in research on this topic. My 2017 novel “A Piece of the World” is based on the real-life relationship between Wyeth and the subject of this painting, Christina Olson, a disabled woman who spent her entire life in a farmhouse in rural Maine. I sat in front of the actual painting for hours at MoMA, listening to the enthused, perturbed, intrigued, dismissive, passionate comments of passersby from all over the globe. (Even when MoMA did display “Christina’s World,” it was stranded, without context, on a fifth-floor hallway between an escalator and the restrooms.)  Over the years, I came to believe that this painting is a Rorschach test, a magic trick, a sleight of hand. Alone in a sea of dry grass, Christina is the archetypal individual against a backdrop of nature, fully present in the moment and yet a haunting reminder of the immensity of time. She is paradoxically singular and representative, exposed and enigmatic, hardy and vulnerable. She is solitary but surrounded by the ghosts of her past. Like the house, like the landscape, she perseveres. As one curator has noted, “The painting is more a psychological landscape than a portrait, a portrayal of a state of mind rather than a place.” “Christina’s World” doesn’t belong at MoMA, where it will never be appreciated. It belongs in a place that will do it justice, situating it in context with artists who influenced Wyeth and who, in turn, were influenced by him. Like two paintings with which Christina’s World is often grouped — James Abbott McNeill Whistler’s “Arrangement in Grey and Black No.1” (1871; commonly known as “Whistler’s Mother”) and Grant Wood’s “American Gothic” (1930) — “Christina’s World” exhibits traits we think of as distinctly American: rugged individualism and quiet strength, defiance in the face of obstacles, a kind of stubborn perseverance. If you go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, you’ll be sure to glimpse John Singer Sargent’s “Madame X.” At the Louvre you’ll see the “Mona Lisa.” At the Whitney, Edward Hopper’s “A Woman in the Sun” is always on display. At MoMA you know you’re going to find those soup cans and that brilliant starry night. Christina, meanwhile, is hidden in storage. Christina Baker Kline is the author of seven novels, including “Orphan Train.”
Grant Wood’s American Gothic is a world-famous painting, so much so that it is considered to be the most misappropriated painting in art history! But do you know its history and hidden meanings? In what context was this painting created? Who are the two characters? Why does it have the title “American Gothic”? Analysis of a masterpiece Grant Wood (1891 – 1942) was an American painter known for his rural Midwest representations. After growing up on a farm in Iowa, he trained in the visual arts and then went to study in Europe in the 1920s. This trip allowed him to discover Flemish paintings, the German Renaissance and the New Objectivity, an artistic movement that developed in Germany and succeeded Expressionism. In 1930, he painted American Gothic, at the very beginning of the Great Depression, the economic crisis that followed the stock market crash of 1929 and plunged the American rural world into great poverty. Who are the characters depicted in this painting?Mystery surrounds the two figures in the painting: who are the woman with the worried look and the man with glasses staring at us? Are they a couple or friends? The man is older, so it is possible that we are looking at a father and his unmarried daughter. The man is dressed in overalls but also in a black jacket, while the woman is wearing a piece of jewellery: they have made an effort to dress up, perhaps for the painter or to celebrate an important moment in their lives. To create them, Grant Wood had his dentist Dr McKeeby and his sister Nan pose. |
The title ‘American Gothic’ is therefore a reference to the neo-Gothic architectural style of this house.
The fork is the third character in this painting. If you look carefully, you will see it on the man’s overalls, on his face and on the upper window of the house.
While a peasant would hold it down to avoid an accident, here it is facing the viewer. Several interpretations have been put forward: it could be a way of preventing the devil from entering the house, or it could be an evocation of sexuality considered perverse in the Midwestern society inherited from a certain puritanism.
Unless, by this gesture, the man is telling us “No entry” to protect the secrets kept in this house, whose closed curtains in the middle of the day suggest that something is being kept from us…
Another interpretation: this dark atmosphere, associated with the worried look of the woman dressed in a black dress, evokes the mourning of a certain idea of America, lost in the serious economic crisis of the 1930s.
Immediately after its premiere, the painting had a mixed reception. Iowans saw it as a caricature of rural life and were angry at being portrayed as ‘pinched, grimacing, fanatical puritans’. However, Grant Wood has always defended himself against this interpretation: for him the painting is a tribute to the rural population of the Midwest.
The artist’s sister, Nan Wood Graham, was made to look ugly by the painting, which led to a family dispute!
American Gothic was successful in the art world: exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago, the painting won a bronze medal and a $300 prize. The painting was featured in newspapers and quickly circulated throughout the country. In 1934, Time magazine ran a full-page reproduction of the painting, which helped make it famous.
The many diversions of American Gothic
Today American Gothic is a world-famous painting that has been hijacked in many ways. To name but a few, it has been used in the series Dexter, in the Disney cartoon Mulan, in The Simpsons, in the credits of Desperate Housewives and on the cover of Time in 1994.
The work is part of the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago and it is therefore there that you should go from now on to be able to admire it!
In Philadelphia, circa 1980's, I picked up two pencil sketches by Clark Goff at an art show and framed them. They remind me of bygone eras. One is titled Elfreth's Alley and the other Washington's Headquarters at Valley Forge. My husband grew up a few miles from Valley Forge, living in a fieldstone house, as did his grandfather. The pencil sketches represent the architecture popular when Quaker farmers were pulling the stones from their fields and using them for utilitarian functions such as houses, barns, and walls.
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| John Chadd House, Chadd's Ford, Pennsylvania Built ca. 1725 by John Wyeth Jr. |
The Process: An Accidental Discovery
After researching my genealogy, I found ancestors living in the Philly area. They built fieldstone houses and grist mills for processing their grain. As their families grew, many moved southward and westward to farm and support their families. |
Samuel P. Dixon House
Source: Mill Creek Hundred
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Samuel Dixon stone barn
Source: Mill Creek Hundred
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In Philadelphia, circa 1980's, I picked up two pencil sketches by Clark Goff at an art show and framed them. They remind me of bygone eras. One is titled Elfreth's Alley and the other Washington's Headquarters at Valley Forge. My husband grew up a few miles from Valley Forge, living in a fieldstone house, as did his grandfather. The pencil sketches represent the architecture popular when Quaker farmers were pulling the stones from their fields and using them for utilitarian functions such as houses, barns, and walls.
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| Fran, John, and Lassie The Fieldstone House |
A New Addition
After an inspiring post from a fellow garden writer, I trimmed a few of our native inland sea oats and placed the arching seeds in a heavy ceramic container. The vase reminds me of dry cracking earth or those fieldstones from our past. This "winter arrangement," is a parable about the strength and fragility of gardener's struggles and the beauty and promise of a new spring.
The simple arrangement is placed in the corner, allowing the sunlight to highlight the golden grains. The sweet yellow vase was painted by our daughter. When I sat down to relax, I realized the corner was an Wyethesque tribute to our heritage. This is my interpretation for the "beauty," in Christina's World seen through Wyethe's eyes. Fragile, yet so strong.
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