Andrew Wyeth: Christina's Bedroom

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.

Christina's World

Andrew Wyeth (American, 1917–2009)

1948. Tempera on panel, 32 1/4 x 47 3/4" (81.9 x 121.3 cm). Purchase

16.1949

• Gallery Label Text

2007

The woman crawling through the tawny grass was the artist's neighbor in Maine, who, crippled by polio, "was limited physically but by no means spiritually." Wyeth further explained, "The challenge to me was to do justice to her extraordinary conquest of a life which most people would consider hopeless." He recorded the arid landscape, rural house, and shacks with great detail, painting minute blades of grass, individual strands of hair, and nuances of light and shadow. In this style of painting, known as magic realism, everyday scenes are imbued with poetic mystery. --MoMA

Andrew Wyeth, Christina's Bedroom, 1947

Andrew Wyeth, Christina's Bedroom, 1947

http://www.sothebys.com/en/catalogues/ecatalogue.html/2009/american-paintings-drawings-sculpture-n08555#/r=/en/ecat.fhtml.N08555.html+r.m=/en/ecat.lot.N08555.html/19/

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