Today I took a trip to the Museum of Modern Art. I just recently started enjoying going to museums. I occupied the mindset of an immature child longer than I should have, not being able to appreciate what museums have to offer. Unfortunately, this trip didn’t exactly validate my decision to start appreciating museums. I was pretty unimpressed. Perhaps this is become I generally can appreciate realist artwork better than I can modern artwork. And who am I to say whether Picasso’s guitar exhibit was impressive, or if the “classics” in the permanent collection of the museum were all that awe-inspiring. So I figured it’s really not important whether I like it. It’s important to see what the artist is doing, or at least try to understand something about the work (whether or not it parallels what the artist had intended).
So I decided to do the following: walk through the exhibits, find several works that caught my eye, think critically about their message, and then research the work to see if my analysis was in any way similar to what the artist had intended. Of course, this doesn’t answer whether it matters if my analysis matched the artist’s, or if understand the intent of the artist is important. That I shall leave for another time.
When you walk into the permanent collection in the MoMA, you immediately see this:
Christina’s World, Andrew Wyeth
I’m not exactly sure why this painting is considered “modern,” but it’s in MoMA, and it immediately intrigued me. And it doesn’t seem like it has a “message” that is supposed to be taken away. It just seems to be telling a story. But understanding the story a painting is trying to convey is the same as understanding a message, because sometimes, the message lies within the story. So what is the story?
You see a field. You see a barn. You see a woman. But what’s happening? To me, it looked like this woman is struggling to crawl up the field, longing the reach the barn. And I guess that could be the extent of it all. Maybe this painting really is about a woman who was hurt and couldn’t walk up the field. Or maybe the story is trying to convey something the artist was feeling himself. Maybe the artist possessed a feeling of powerlessness; that he was unable of doing certain things in his life that he hoped he could do.
That was my immediate reaction to the painting (immediate reaction with some thought, of course).
I found a description of the piece on Wikipedia.
The woman in the painting is Christina Olson. She suffered from Polio, a muscular deterioration that paralyzed her lower body. Wyeth was inspired to create the painting when through a window from within the house he saw her crawling across a field. Wyeth had a summer home in the area and was on friendly terms with Olson, using her and her younger brother as the subject of paintings from 1940 to 1968. Although Olson was the inspiration and subject of the painting, she was not the primary model — Wyeth's wife Betsy posed as the torso of the painting.
So I had a pretty good sense of what it was about (although my small thought about the artist and how the painting related to him seems to have no basis.)
But does it matter that I was able to understand the story the artist was conveying? I'm not so sure. The piece is quite beautiful just as a piece of art. The story definitely gives it a greater level of depth. And finding out the story after looking at the piece for quite some time definitely gave me some shivers.
So for now, I can't say. I can only continue to investigate and explore. And take another trip to the MoMA — I was kind of hoping I'd love it. Definitely need to give it another chance.
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