Steadfast

This is one of the most famous paintings in America, and most people have no idea what they are actually looking at... The painting is Christina's World, made by Andrew Wyeth in 1948, and the woman was real: her name was Anna Christina Olson, Wyeth's neighbour in Cushing, Maine. Since childhood a degenerative condition had slowly taken the strength from her legs, until walking was no longer possible. She refused a wheelchair, and for her entire adult life she chose to drag herself across the ground with her arms instead, going wherever she wanted to go under her own power. Wyeth saw her one afternoon from an upstairs window, alone in that vast field, crawling slowly toward the house on the hill. He said the painting was an attempt to do justice to her extraordinary conquest of a life which most people would consider hopeless. Her world, he said, was limited physically but by no means spiritually. That is what turns this painting from a portrait of frailty into one of the most triumphant images ever made... Look at it long enough and it stops being about what her body took from her, and becomes about what she would not stop doing anyway. The field is enormous and she is small and the house is far away, and still she goes, because the alternative, to be carried, to give up, to let the distance win, was something she simply would not accept. There is one more thing: Christina loved this painting. Pink was her favorite color, and Wyeth had placed her exactly where she most wanted to be, out in the open, in her own field, under her own sky. Late in her life, when she could no longer even crawl out to that field, she said something that holds the whole meaning of art inside it: "Andy put me where he knew I wanted to be. Now that I can’t be there anymore, all I do is think of that picture, and I’m there."