More than anything else that Wyeth paints, Christina’s individuality and inner strength are a mirror-portrait of the artist himself. None of Wyeth’s portraits of Christina look alike the artist injects his own humanity into the people and places around him. Despite her painful loneliness, she is dignified, proud and intelligent.

He talks a great deal when he paints, but he doesn’t talk nonsense.” She does not talk nonsense either. Christina, now nearing 70, does not let anyone see how she moves about, stubbornly refuses to use a wheelchair. The smell of burning oil, charred wood, fat cats and old cloth fills the air. Christina’s house contains the anonymous leavings of years of confinement.

“I don’t take some people to see her,” says Wyeth, “because they won’t understand.” He fears that they will find her grotesque. He judges people by their reactions to her. Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art, which hesitated before buying it in 1948 for $2,200, has repaid its investment 22 times over in the sale of reproductions.Ĭhristina, who is crippled by polio, is one of Wyeth’s few close friends. Against the wall of landscape that leads up to her house, the crippled body of an ageless woman seems trapped, imprisoned by the very emptiness of the earth. One of them, Christina’s World, now 15 years old, is one of the most durable and disquieting images of 20th century America. He has painted eight temperas of her or her house, a decrepit three-story clapboard pile atop a knoll near the Maine seacoast. The most famous of these is a woman named Christina Olson. TIME Magazine, however, had a different take on the painting in a cover story on Wyeth in 1963, calling the work, “One of the most durable and disquieting images of 20th century America,” and explaining the story behind the picture: I thought, ‘Boy, is this one ever a flat tire.'” Of his most famous painting, which now hangs in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Wyeth said, “When I first painted it in 1948, Christina’s World hung all summer in my house in Maine and nobody particularly reacted to it. LIFE would feature Wyeth, who died in 2009, and his paintings many times over the years, including extensive articles in 1953 and a 1965 profile that featured 22 pages of his favorite paintings and a first-person interview by Richard Meryman, who became a good friend of Wyeth’s and went on to write a biography of the painter.

Wyeth painting