<i>Ugly</i>: Part 7, Christina's World

Dan, my friend and colleague, returned to our class on Ugly this week to speak about how art offers us a metaphor regarding the redemption of the "ugly."

In his book Status Anxiety, Alain de Botton observes how in art's portrayal of the mundane, everyday, and lower class an artist can subvert our cultural expectations about what is worthy of honor and esteem. de Botton's concerns are about status while mine are about the beautiful and the ugly, but the projects are similar in many ways: An artist can take something that is lower status (e.g., the ugly) and transform it, via her moral and aesthetic vision, into something honorable and beautiful. As de Botton writes (p. 143), "[The works of some artists] appear to suggest that if such commonplaces as the sky on a summer's evening, a pitted wall heated by the sun and the face of an unknown woman as she peels an egg for sick person are truly among the loveliest sights we may hope ever to lay our eyes on, then perhaps we are honour-bound to question the value of much that we have been taught to respect and aspire to. It may seem far-fetched to hang a quasipolitical programme on a jug placed on a sideboard, or on a cow grazing in a pasture, but the moral of [this] work...may help us to correct many of our snobbish preconceptions regarding what there is to esteem and honor in the world."

In short, the eye of an artist is a metaphor for the eye of God and, thus, the eye of the Christian. That is, we find, because of the unique way we see the world, beauty in the ugly and honor in what the world discards.

Dan walked us through many examples of this metaphor, but the one that struck me most was the painting Christina's World.

Many consider Christina's World to be Andrew Wyeth's most famous painting. As most know, Wyeth is an American painter of the realist school. Wyeth's favorite subjects are the landscapes and his neighbors from his hometown of Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania and his summer home in Cushing, Maine. As we noted with de Botton, Wyeth picks landscapes and people that are not generally considered to be "beautiful." But through his paintings Wyeth redeems, honors, and elevates his subject matter. Christina's World is a wonderful example of this (please click on the picture below for a closer view):



First, consider the way Wyeth renders the landscape. Living in West Texas I often drive through flat, brown, and treeless landscapes. Thus. many people find West Texas "ugly." I grew up in Pennsylvania so I understand where this comes from. But I've come to disagree with the majority view. I now find these West Texas landscapes to be beautiful. I like to think I see the landscape the way Wyeth sees his landscapes. What appears monochromatic at first glance, if you look closely at Christina's World, is really rich and, with a nod to the last post in this series, pied. The ugliness of the land is redeemed in the eye of Wyeth.

Let us now look at Christina, the woman in the picture. Upon first glance the scene looks romantic. A woman appears to be lounging and gazing wistfully at the farmhouse. The scene seems peaceful and relaxed.

But nothing could be further from the truth. Christina Olson, the woman in the painting, suffered from muscular degeneration, probably polio, that paralyzed her lower body. You can see this in the painting by looking closely at Christina's right arm. Consequently, Christina is looking back at the farmhouse, not with relaxation, but with a bit of dread and fatigue. Christina has drug herself out to the garden to pick vegetables and now, very tired, has to face the prospect of dragging herself across the ground back to the house. This is Christina's world.

How are we to look at Christina's World? On the one hand the painting is spiritual, beautiful, romantic, and peaceful. But on the other hand the painting is brutally physical, difficult, tragic, and full of struggle.

Obviously, this dual perspective is the genius of Christina's World. As Wyeth has said of the painting and of Christina, Christina "was limited physically but by no means spiritually." Thus, "The challenge to me was to do justice to her extraordinary conquest of a life which most people would consider hopeless."

Christina's world is our world. On the one hand it is tragic, difficult, and ugly. But if we have the eyes of God, as Wyeth did, a wholly other perspective opens up to us.