Christina's World

 

James Lucas

@JamesLucasIT

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."

George Hart

@Vera_Icona_23

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2h

Andrew Wyeth is buried in the small Olson family graveyard about 200 feet away from where Christina is depicted in the painting She & her brother are buried there also As now is Andy's wife Betsy

Allegory of Satan

 

James Lucas

@JamesLucasIT

They say the devil hates his servants the most. Here's why... This painting is called Allegory of Satan, or Lord of the World, painted around 1900 by the Polish artist Ludwik Stasiak. It is not the devil you might expect. There are no flames, no chaos and no horns leering out of the dark. Stasiak painted something far more unsettling. Here the devil sits enthroned like a ruler of the world, with a sardonic grin on his face, surrounded by the symbols of earthly power: wealth, ambition, domination, and death. Evil, he suggests, never arrives as something horrifying that we instantly reject. It arrives as something attractive. It looks like success. It looks like money, and status, and control. It looks like everything the world tells us to want. And that is what makes the painting feel so modern, more than a century after it was made. Stasiak was working at the turn of the twentieth century, an age obsessed, like ours, with progress and fortune and getting ahead. And he was warning that the most dangerous evil is not the kind that frightens us, but the kind that seduces us, the kind we serve willingly because it promises to make us powerful. Which brings us back to the old saying. Look closely at what lies beneath his throne. Scattered at its base are the skulls of the powerful, still wearing their crowns and their helmets in death, the very people who traded their souls for money and power. And he sits above them, amused, because the joke is on them. This is why the devil hates his servants the most. He does not respect them for serving him. He despises them for it, because they handed over the only thing that ever mattered in exchange for things that rot. That is the real power of the painting: Stasiak did not depict a devil we would run from, he painted a devil we would kneel to, and follow, and call our lord, mistaking our own chains for a crown. He was only giving form to a warning as old as the Gospels themselves: "No one can serve two masters. You cannot serve both God and money."