Christina's World

Christina's World is a 1948 painting by American painter Andrew Wyeth and one of the best-known American paintings of the mid-20th century. It is a tempera work done in a realist style, depicting a woman in an inclined position on the ground in a treeless, mostly tawny field, looking up at a gray house on the horizon, a barn, and various other small outbuildings adjacent to the house.^[1] It is held by the Museum of Modern Art, in New York.^[1]

Christina's World
Artist	Andrew Wyeth
Year	1948[1]
Catalogue	78455
Medium	Egg tempera on gessoed panel[1]
Dimensions	81.9 cm × 121.3 cm (32+1⁄4 in × 47+3⁄4 in)[1]
Location	Museum of Modern Art, New York
Accession	16.1949

Background

The woman in the painting is Anna Christina Olson (May 3, 1893 – January 27, 1968). Anna had a degenerative muscular disorder, possibly polio or Charcot-Marie-Tooth disorder, which left her unable to walk.^[1] She was firmly against using a wheelchair, so would crawl everywhere. Wyeth was inspired to create the painting when he saw her crawling across a field while he was watching from a window in the house. He had a summer home in the area, and was on friendly terms with Olson, using her younger brother and her as the subjects of paintings from 1940 to 1968. Olson was the inspiration and subject of the painting, but she was not the primary model; Wyeth's wife Betsy posed as the torso of the painting. Olson was 55 at the time that Wyeth created the work.^[2]

The house depicted in the painting is known as the Olson House in Cushing, Maine, and is open to the public, operated by the Farnsworth Art Museum.^[3] It is a National Historic Landmark and has been restored to match its appearance in the painting,^[4][5][6] although Wyeth separated the house from its barn and changed the lay of the land for the painting. Wyeth is buried in the nearby Olson family graveyard.

Reception and history

Christina's World was first exhibited at the Macbeth Gallery in Manhattan in 1948.^[7] It received little attention from critics at the time, but Alfred Barr, the founding director of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), bought the painting for $1,800 (equivalent to $18,200 in 2023 dollars). He promoted it at MoMA, and it gradually grew in popularity. Today, it is considered an icon of American art and is rarely lent out by the museum.^[8][9]

In popular culture

In Arthur C. Clarke's novel 2001: A Space Odyssey, Christina's World is one of the two paintings (the other one being Vincent van Gogh's Bridge at Arles) hanging on the living room wall of "an elegant, anonymous hotel suite" to which the astronaut David Bowman is transported after passing through the Star Gate.^[10][11] It does not appear in the film adaptation directed by Stanley Kubrick. The painting is, however, part of the sci-fi film Oblivion (2013), paying homage to the novel.

The life of Olson and her encounter with Wyeth is portrayed in the novel A Piece of the World by Christina Baker Kline.^[12]

A scene in the 1994 film Forrest Gump^[13] and a chapter in the 2020 video game The Last of Us Part II^[14] were inspired by the painting.

The painting is also referred to in the 2020 film I'm Thinking of Ending Things,^[15][16] a season-four episode of the TV series Atlanta, a Madeline Johnston song of the same name,^[17] and Ethel Cain's music video for the 2022 song "American Teenager".^[18]

The painting appears several times throughout HBO's Westworld (2016–2022).^{[citation needed]} Showrunner Jonathan Nolan has at least once mentioned Christina's World as a "reference" for the show's character Dolores Abernathy.^[19] Evan Rachel Wood, who plays Dolores in seasons 1–3, reappears in season 4 as a character named "Christina".

The painting appears in the 2011 movie A Separation by Asghar Farhadi as a decorative piece inside the house where most of the movie takes place.

5 minutes and 50 seconds into "Raid", the tenth episode of the animated series Common Side Effects (2025), Jonas Backstein finds himself taking Christina's place in a grim imitation of Christina's World. The sky is a stormy, foreboding red, and the Olsen House has been replaced by a darkened Swiss chalet.

The painting (altered) is shown in several episodes of Amazon Prime's Invincible (2021-), at the home Atom Eve grew up in, but this rendition of the painting is without Olson's figure depicted in the landscape.