At age 31, Wyeth had accomplished something that eludes most painters, even some of the best, in an entire lifetime. Today the painting’s value is measured in the millions. Within a decade or so the museum had banked reproduction fees amounting to hundreds of times the sum-$1,800-they had paid to acquire the picture. Thomas Hoving, who would later become director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, recalls that as a college student he would sometimes visit the MoMA for the sole purpose of studying this single painting. When it was hung there in December 1948, thousands of visitors related to it in a personal way, and perhaps somewhat to the embarrassment of the curators, who tended to favor European modern art, it became one of the most popular works in the museum. Powerful figures of finance and the art world quietly dropped by the gallery, and within weeks the painting had been purchased by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Within a few days, whispers about a remarkable painting were circulating in Manhattan. In October, when he shipped the painting to a New York City gallery, he told his wife, Betsy, “This picture is a complete flat tire.”
When he was done, Wyeth hung it over the sofa in his living room. Wyeth recalls that, after sketching the figure, “I put this pink tone on her shoulder-and it almost blew me across the room.”įinishing the painting brought a sense of fatigue and let-down. Against the subdued tone of the brown grass, the pink of her dress feels almost explosive.
Her body is turned away from us, so that we get to know her simply through the twist of her torso, the clench of her right fist, the tension of her right arm and the slight disarray of her thick, dark hair. For months Wyeth worked on nothing but the grass then, much more quickly, delineated the buildings at the top of the hill. In the summer of 1948 a young artist named Andrew Wyeth began a painting of a severely crippled woman, Christina Olson, painfully pulling herself up a seemingly endless sloping hillside with her arms. Editor's Note, January 16, 2009: In the wake of Andrew Wyeth's death at the age of 91, Smithsonian magazine recalls the 2006 major retrospective of Wyeth's work and the ongoing controversy over his artistic legacy.
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