Museum of Modern Art acquires famous painting by Andrew Wyeth Christina’s world in 1949, one year after its creation. For decades it has been one of the most well-known, popular and mysterious works of art in the Museum of Modern Art’s collection. It will soon be back on display at the museum after an extensive and long-awaited conservation project, which MoMA’s senior collections photographer Adam Neese recently detailed in the museum’s online magazine.
This small genre painting, executed in tempera and gesso on Masonite panel, is almost always on display in the Museum’s Picturing America gallery on the fifth floor, sharing space with photographs by Berenice Abbott and Walker Evans and paintings by Edward Hopper and Charles Shearer. Last year, it was removed from the gallery as part of a scheduled art rotation, giving conservators the opportunity to closely examine it in a laboratory for the first time in nearly three decades. The most recent photos, from 1996, were taken with slides. Given the advances in imaging technology in recent years, MoMA’s conservation team was eager to study the painting’s brushstrokes, surface textures and layers of paint in the laboratory.
Techniques used by Nice and his colleagues include high-magnification photography, oblique light (which reveals different textures on the painting’s surface), and infrared photography and reflectography (which give conservators clues to the “hidden” layers of the painting below the surface). “The process is iterative,” Ness wrote. “One question in the conservation lab will bring me back to the imaging studio. Another question in the conservation scientist will lead to the passage of infrared light. It’s a symbiotic exchange between imaging, conservation and science.”
Thanks to some high-resolution images, Ness and others believe Wyeth altered some of the content Christina’s worldespecially the eaves of the house, the shed and the horizon, which influence the “emotional weight” of the painting. Infrared reflection photography shows how Wyeth changed the perspective of the painting after applying a layer of plaster, which made the space between Christina and the farmhouse beyond feel wider, making Christina more emotionally isolated. The conservation team also studied the painting’s chemical composition. Ness et al. were able to record tiny air bubbles in the paint on the top layer of the painting, caused by the water Wyeth added to the egg yolks when mixing the paint.
Christina’s world——“The equivalent of the Louvre Mona Lisa The audience will continue to gaze upon the rural Maine landscape, marveling at Wyeth’s meticulous brushwork, wondering what happened to this woman of unknown age, and looking longingly at the clapboard house in the distance.
