CHRISTINA’S WORLD—A CONCEPT, BUT NOT “CONCEPTUAL ART.”

CHRISTINA’S WORLD—A CONCEPT, BUT NOT “CONCEPTUAL ART.” One of the important trends in contemporary art is conceptual art, which this wikipedia article defines as: “art in which the concept(s) or idea(s) involved in the work take precedence over traditional aesthetic and material concerns.” It is ironic that what seems to me a powerful concept underlies one of Wyeth’s best known works, CHRISTINA’S WORLD. It shows a cripple, a real person whom Wyeth knew and had seen struggling to cross a meadow. The immense care and skill that went into the painting of the grass has been a target for criticism, as in this article which notes “the way Wyeth painted each blade of grass, a mechanical and unremarkable kind of realism that was distinctive if only for going against the rising tide of abstraction in America in the late 1940’s.” Yet the painting shows that close familiarity with grass is part of the crippled woman’s world. Of necessity, she (and anyone who must crawl) sees grass with great exactitude.