One of the most popular paintings in New York’s MoMA is Christina’s World (1948) by American realist artist Andrew Wyeth. Lying in an empty treeless field of dried-out grass, with her back turned to the viewer, is a young woman. Her slightly dishevelled dark hair has been tied back in a ponytail and she wears a pale pink dress pulled in to her slender waist by a soft black belt. At first glance, it looks like she’s awaiting the arrival of someone – a lover, perhaps?
If you look more closely at this seemingly romantic image, however, it becomes clear that the reclining figure is far from relaxed: one thin arm stretches towards an old, grey farmhouse which is visible in the distance, while the other seems to prop the woman up, making her appear surprisingly alert. Since the painting was first exhibited, viewers have been drawn in by this solitary sitter and the questions she raises: who is she, what is she doing here, and why has Wyeth painted her?
In order to determine the identity and significance of Wyeth’s muse, we must first meet his wife. On 12 July 1939, the twenty-two-year-old artist was invited by Merle James, a fellow artist and printer, to visit him at home in Cushing on the coast of Maine. It seems that Merle may have had an ulterior motive for the visit, as he introduced Wyeth to his three daughters, including the youngest, seventeen-year-old Betsy James, whom the artist would marry the following year. Having recently learned to drive, Betsy offered to take Wyeth to see a nearby nineteenth-century saltwater farm; instantly struck by the vision of this weathered three-storey building on a hilltop, Wyeth leant against the hood of her car to take a quick watercolour impression of it.
During this trip, Betsy also introduced Wyeth to the owner of this isolated farmhouse, as well as his sister and her close friend since childhood, Anna Christina Olson. As a young girl, Olson had developed a degenerative muscle condition – likely to have been Charcot-Marie Tooth (CMT) disease which causes weakness and a lack of coordination in the limbs – leaving her unable to walk. It is Olson who inspired Christina’s World, and appears as if lying in the grass, pictured in front of the farmhouse, now known as Olson House, where she lived with her brother Alvaro.
This famous artwork is one of four paintings, as well as a large number of drawings, in which Wyeth took Olson as his muse. Explaining his decision to paint her, the artist stated that he wanted ‘to do justice to her extraordinary conquest of a life which most people would consider hopeless. If in some small way I have been able in paint to make the viewer sense that her world may be limited physically but by no means spiritually, then I have achieved what I set out to do.’ It’s undoubtedly a worthy goal, but did Wyeth, an able-bodied man observing Olson from his own perspective, deliver it?
Although they met in 1939, it took Wyeth until 1947 to paint his first portrait of her. However, he did depict Olson House and the surrounding farmland hundreds of times before then, remarking, ‘I just couldn’t stay away from there. I did other pictures while I knew them but I’d always seem to gravitate back to the house… It was Maine.’ Following the first introduction by Betsy, Wyeth developed a close friendship with the Olson siblings, who allowed him to turn one of the upstairs rooms into a studio from which he painted the view repeatedly, indicating the special place it occupied in his heart.
One mesmerising painting, Wind from the Sea (1947), frames the sun-bleached windowsill in the studio opening up on to the dry, stark landscape. A rush of hot air blows the curtains, on which are embroidered small birds which swoop into the room; you can almost feel the heat of summer in Maine. Two parallel dirt tracks across the field hint at human presence: even before appearing in Wyeth’s paintings, Olson’s existence on the farm is intimated. ‘In the portraits of that house, the windows are eyes or pieces of the soul almost. To me, each window is a different part of Christina’s life,’ he once accounted.
It was that same year that Wyeth made his first direct painting of Olson, titled simply Christina Olson (1947), in which he visualised the connection between his muse and her home. Dressed in a short-sleeved, deep green casual cotton dress, with her hair tied back, Olson leans against a wooden door, propped open, which leads out to the farm. Gazing across her land, she straddles both the inside shadowed house and the outside world, illuminated by a geometric shaft of light, the wind catching her hair. Wyeth had discovered Olson, sitting in this quietly contented pose, by chance: ‘One day I came in and saw her on the back door step in the late afternoon. She had finished all her work in the kitchen, and there she was sitting quietly, with a far-off look to the sea. At the time, I thought she looked like a wounded seagull with her bony arms, slightly long hair back over her shoulder, and strange shadows of her cast on the side of the weathered door, which had this white porcelain knob on it. And that was the beginning of the painting. She didn’t mind being disturbed at all, actually she enjoyed it.’
Wyeth never instructed Olson to pose for him, and for good reason. As a young artist, he had hired men and women who sat for life-drawing sessions in his father’s studio. He remembers that these people ‘would come for maybe three, four hours a day and pose in a position I would fix them in’, but it was when he would instruct them ‘to have a rest for fifteen minutes or so’ that he’d ‘really begin to work’. He explains, ‘That’s when they would sit or stand or relax in odd, truly human positions. That was really the human figure. That taught me action, taught me to capture them in movement.’
Wyeth’s preference for portraying his muses, moving or resting naturally, is evident in his portraits of Olson who, by this time, would have been at her ease around him as the artist became more of an honorary family member than a guest. When he wasn’t working, Wyeth would comb her hair and wash her face; he also recalled with admiration that she ‘was a very intelligent person’, whose company he enjoyed. They would spend hours discussing books and, when apart, the pair sent one another letters – Olson wrote frequently about the wild animals she spotted on the farm. The nature of this close relationship, based on mutual friendship, trust and respect, is evident in Wyeth’s unstaged images of Olson, including his most celebrated painting, Christina’s World.
It was while he was upstairs, painting another picture from his studio, that he spotted her outside, crawling across the grass: ‘I saw her in the field… She was out getting some vegetables and she was pulling herself slowly back toward the house. It was late afternoon, and I happened to look out of the third-floor window, where I was finishing the picture called “Seed Corn”, and there she was.’ Olson refused to use a wheelchair, choosing instead to navigate her property and its land by crawling across it.
Therefore, in Christina’s World, Olson is not static or lying on the ground, as she may first appear, but moving, using her arms to both prop herself up and push herself forward – a technique she had learnt on her own. Wyeth’s portrayal is, in many respects, a truthful one: he has represented Olson dragging herself along the ground. But the painting is not without its problems: although Wyeth says that he was committed to doing ‘justice’ to Olson, there is one immediately obvious issue with the artist’s representation of her. Why does Olson, who was aged forty-five at the time, appear as a much younger woman? Was Wyeth, perhaps, sanitising her body for viewers?
During the early twentieth century in America, people with disabilities faced significant segregation and oppression. Considered by the medical and political establishments as ‘unfit’ for normal roles in society, disabled people were excluded from many jobs. We see this in John Steinbeck’s 1937 novella Of Mice and Men in which Candy, having lost one of his hands in a work accident, knows that he will soon be fired and replaced by a non-disabled worker. Moreover, until 1974 many cities across America enacted an ‘ugly law’, which banned people considered ‘diseased, maimed, mutilated or in any way deformed’ from public spaces. This provided a legal basis for deliberately removing disabled people from sight; Olson would therefore have been physically, as well as emotionally, segregated from mainstream society.
This poor treatment of disabled people is reflected in art history, which abounds with celebratory images of idealised, athletic bodies. Simultaneously, artists have been responsible for intentionally framing disabled people as criminals and sinners, further subordinating disabled people through negative depictions. Most famously, modern American photographer Diane Arbus was criticised for her exploitation of disabled sitters, including those with dwarfism and Down’s syndrome, in her black-and-white images from the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s. By encouraging her models, whom she referred to (shockingly by today’s standards) as ‘freaks’, to pose awkwardly, she exaggerated their ‘otherness’.
It’s clear that Wyeth was in no way drawing attention to Olson’s body in order to present her as a ‘freak’. But was he, perhaps, airbrushing out her disability? Although Wyeth based Christina’s World on Olson, and that moment he had spotted her from his studio window, we know that he used another model to complete the artwork: his wife, Betsy. At this time, Betsy was still in her twenties, and this is evident in the modelling of the slim, attractive, small-waisted figure. It could, therefore, be argued that Wyeth replaced parts of Olson with Betsy for the sake of his own notions of beauty.
Furthermore, it could also be argued that Wyeth was creating what we would today term ‘inspiration porn’. Coined by the late Australian disability activist Stella Young, the label has been issued to critique images which frame disability through the lens of sentimentality or pity, focus on an uplifting moral message which is primarily aimed at non-disabled viewers, and anonymously objectify, and thus exploit, the sitter.
Respected art historian Randall C. Griffin certainly finds Olson’s position on the field – as if viewed from above – problematic and exploitative: ‘Given her attractive figure, vulnerable pose, and isolation, the picture constructs her as an object of possible assault, and the viewer as either possible rescuer – or ravager. The viewer’s elevated vantage point, that of a standing person looking down at this prone figure, itself connotes power.’ However, there is another possible reading of Christina’s World if we consider it from the point of view of the muse. Olson, who is pictured from behind, invites us to see things from her perspective; with her thin outstretched hand, tinged grey, she points towards her farmhouse, as if inviting her audience home with her. If we follow her gaze, it’s also as if she is watching Wyeth, whom she invited to paint pictures, including this one, from the upper studio with its window overlooking the land. Granted agency by Wyeth, Olson is actively looking at and moving towards her house, as if engaged in the very moment that the painting was created.
Portraying disability in art is not easy to get right; in fact, many artists have got it very badly wrong, including Jake and Dinos Chapman. In 1995 the British duo created a three-metre-tall fibreglass sculpture of Stephen Hawking in his wheelchair, perched perilously atop a tall rocky mountain. The work, rather than stressing the intellectual brilliance of the theoretical physicist, emphasises the physical impact of motor neurone disease on Hawking’s body in crude and emphatic terms.
In contrast, Wyeth’s painting doesn’t forefront Olson’s disability in either a condescending or salacious way. Instead, there is a quietness to it through which he not only banishes negative stereotypes of frailty, but also wipes out any romantic myth of the weak damsel in distress. He is not inviting viewers to feel pity for his friend, nor is he painting her in an aspirational manner – she has not been elevated to the status of an inspirational heroine within a dramatised scene. In fact, when the canvas was first exhibited, Wyeth received hundreds of letters from viewers who, unaware of Olson’s disability, identified with the figure in his everyday image of life on a farm.
At the same time, the artist did identify his muse through the poignant title of the work, Christina’s World, revealing his endeavour to paint from her viewpoint. We know that Wyeth was determined to get the final image just right – there are pages and pages of sketches which preceded the painting, explaining in part why he needed Betsy as a stand-in model as he worked on it ‘from eight o’clock until five-thirty every day for weeks’. Wyeth also took this considered approach to the painting of the picture since it was intended – beyond representing the spontaneous sighting of Olson from his studio window – as a tribute to her life more widely. As the artist later reflected, ‘Christina’s World is more than just her portrait. It really was her whole life and that is what she liked in it. She loved the feeling of being out in the field, where she couldn’t go finally at the end of her life.’
Blending the image of the two women, Wyeth was also able to capture a more youthful version of Olson, whom he and his wife had known for many years by this point. Particularly during the last few years of her life, when she was confined to the first floor of her home due to progressive weakness in her limbs, this painting represented an earlier freedom for Olson. She accompanied Wyeth to see his paintings – including those of her – once they were framed and exhibited in local galleries, and she is said to have loved this artwork. ‘Christina’s World was her favourite,’ he recalled.
Wyeth has placed Olson’s body centre stage. Far from being framed as a tragic figure or ‘other’, whose difference is exploited for an artist’s masterpiece, she is celebrated in sensitive and humanising terms. As Dr Donna McDonald, whose research areas include deaf identity, disability policy, and representations of disability in the visual arts, points out, narratives such as these ‘offer us alternative means of understanding, contesting and re-configuring what we think we know about disability, and the everyday life experiences of people with disability. The power of a single visual arts image, let alone a body of works over time, to illuminate a theme such as disability cannot be underestimated.’
Wyeth was paying tribute to the everyday experience of his close friend and muse, whom he admired on many levels. While he shows her separated from the outside world, the viewer is invited to share a moment in Olson’s life, almost feeling the wind which catches her hair as she looks upon her farmhouse and fields. This is her domain, to which Wyeth has been given access. While there is some sentimentality to the painting, Wyeth has done justice to his muse, situated naturally within the world she created around her. As Wyeth once explained: ‘I’ve seen Olson’s from the air on the way back by plane to Pennsylvania – that little square of the house, dry, magical – and I think, My God, that fabulous person. There she is, sitting there. She’s like a queen ruling all of Cushing. She’s everybody’s conscience. I honestly did not pick her out to do because she was a crippleI. It was the dignity of Christina Olson. The dignity of this lady.’
In the winter of 1967–68, Christina and Alvaro Olson passed away within a month of one another, and were buried on their farmland. One year before he died, Wyeth told the L.A. Times that he, too, wished to join them there: ‘I want to be with Christina.’ With his request granted, today Wyeth lies beside the Olsons, as well as Betsy, who had first introduced her husband to this remarkable muse; all four of them, united, belong to Christina’s World.