You've seen Christina's World. But have you seen her bedroom?
Andrew Wyeth's most celebrated painting is Christina's World, on view in New York's Museum of Modern Art. It's a marvelous painting, seemingly full of unstated possibilities and, in its realism, strikingly different from the modernist fare that is the museum's bread and butter.
By contrast, I was just a little disheartened to see Wyeth's watercolor rendering of Christina's Bedroom from 1947 which was auctioned at Sotheby's in 2009. I guess I had hoped Christina might have a nicer room and a better life. The bedroom is relatively spare and stark, depicted with a bare mattress and bare walls. All of this seems to me to be a jarring contrast with the hope, determination, and limitless potential seen in the later 1948 tempera. Nice, stately cat, though.
Andrew Wyeth's most celebrated painting is Christina's World, on view in New York's Museum of Modern Art. It's a marvelous painting, seemingly full of unstated possibilities and, in its realism, strikingly different from the modernist fare that is the museum's bread and butter.
By contrast, I was just a little disheartened to see Wyeth's watercolor rendering of Christina's Bedroom from 1947 which was auctioned at Sotheby's in 2009. I guess I had hoped Christina might have a nicer room and a better life. The bedroom is relatively spare and stark, depicted with a bare mattress and bare walls. All of this seems to me to be a jarring contrast with the hope, determination, and limitless potential seen in the later 1948 tempera. Nice, stately cat, though.
Andrew Wyeth, Christina's Bedroom, 1947 |
Andrew Wyeth, Christina's Bedroom, 1947
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Thank you. I have never seen Christina's Bedroom before. How depressing, the colors I suppose, and that dreadful window that looks as if some kind of animal skin is being used for a curtain.
ReplyDeleteI did however, see Jamie Wyeth's "Draft Age" up close and personal when it was hanging on a wall in the Chadd's Ford Inn and that was probably back in the late sixties.
Yes, Leo, it's fascinating how Andrew Wyeth used his consummate skill with watercolor to show us something we really don't wish to see.
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