Image via the
Museum of Modern Art. Text from an article in
Mental Floss:
The 31-year-old Wyeth modeled the painting's frail-looking brunette
after his neighbor in South Cushing, Maine. Anna Christina Olson
suffered from a degenerative muscular disorder [Charcot-Marie-Tooth
disease] that prevented her from
walking. Rather than using a wheelchair, Olson crawled around her home
and the surrounding grounds... The sight of Olson picking blueberries while crawling through her fields
“like a crab on a New England shore” inspired Wyeth to paint Christina’s World.
Art historians have often snubbed Wyeth's works in their surveys, and
some naysayers have attacked the painting's widespread popularity,
deriding it as "a mandatory dorm room poster." Meanwhile, critics have
chastised Wyeth's attention on Olson's infirmity and characterized it as
exploitation. Still others claim there was no art in rendering
realistic imagery in paint...
Christina's World remained her favorite to the end. Once when I
asked her why, she simply smiled and said, 'You know pink is my
favorite color.' 'But you're wearing a flowered pink dress in Miss Olson
and holding a kitten. I thought you loved kittens.' 'Course I do, but
in the other one 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.'
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