The Museum of Modern Art acquired Andrew Wyeth’s now-famous painting Christina’s World in 1949, a year after its creation. For decades it has been one of the most recognizable, popular—and enigmatic—artworks in MoMA’s collection. It’s about to go back on view at the museum, after an extensive and long-awaited conservation project, which MoMA’s senior collections photographer Adam Neese recently wrote about in great detail for the museum’s online magazine.
The small genre painting, made with egg tempera over gesso on a Masonite board, is almost always on view in the “Picturing America” gallery on the museum’s 5th floor, sharing space with photographs by Berenice Abbott and Walker Evans and paintings by Edward Hopper and Charles Sheeler. It was removed from the gallery last year as part of a scheduled artwork rotation, giving conservators the opportunity to examine it closely in the lab for the first time in nearly three decades. The most recent photographs, from 1996, were taken on slide film. Given the advances in imaging technology in the intervening years, the conservation team at MoMA was eager to study the painting’s brushstrokes, surface textures, and layers of paint in the lab.
The techniques Neese and his colleagues employed involved high-magnification photography, raking light (which revealed varying textures on the surface of the painting), and inrfared photography and reflectography (which clued the conservators in to “hidden” layers of painting below the surface). “The process,” Neese wrote, “was iterative. A question from the conservation lab would send me back to the imaging studio. Another question from conservation scientists would lead to a pass in infrared. It was a symbiotic exchange between imaging, conservation, and science.”
Thanks to some of the high-resolution images, Neese and others believe that Wyeth reworked parts of Christina’s World, specifically the eaves of the house, shed, and horizon line, which influenced the painting’s “emotional weight.” Infrared reflectography shows how Wyeth shifted the painting’s perspective after he applied the layer of gesso, which makes the space between Christina and the distance farmhouse feel more vast, and thus Christina more emotionally isolated. The conservation team was also able to study the painting’s chemical makeup. Neese and co. were able to document tiny bubbles within the painting’s top layer of pigment, caused by the water Wyeth added to egg yolks when he mixed his paints.
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Christina’s World—“the equivalent of the Louvre’s Mona Lisa in crowd appeal”—will be back on view in the museum’s collection galleries before too long. Visitors will continue to gaze upon the pastoral Maine scene, marveling at Wyeth’s meticulous brushstrokes and wondering what is really going on with the woman of indeterminate age, looking longingly at the faraway clapboard house.
