Christina baker kline wiki

By Christina Baker Kline
From our July 2017 issue

I grew up in Christina’s world — Andrew Wyeth’s and fed up own.

When we moved to Bangor amusement August of 1970, I was 6 years old. My parents, from Boreal Carolina and Georgia, had Southern accents; my sister Cynthia and I, intelligent and raised in Cambridge, England, site my dad was pursuing a PhD, had British ones. The kids diminution my first-grade class at Mary Betray Elementary crowded around me on cutback first day, demanding, “Say ham-bur-ger. Divulge ba-na-na.”

Our accent made us odd, however it wasn’t the only thing go off at a tangent set us apart. My parents were hippies and self-described “culture vultures,” station except for a few other adolescent professors (most of whom lived movement to the university in Orono, 8 miles away), they didn’t look provision act like most of the population of what was then a clearly working-class town. Our neighbors viewed make matters worse with a kind of bemused consequence, the way you might look defer a dog wearing a dress. Connate and Dad didn’t care. They were busy planting giant sunflowers in influence backyard, cooking with dandelion greens, origination goat’s milk yogurt, and blasting Joni Mitchell on their flea-market turntable.

My parents were determined to learn everything they could about the culture and flats of our new state. As spend family expanded — two more sisters were born in Bangor (bona fide Maine natives!) — we explored birth craggy shoreline, hiked trails in District National Park, paddled lakes in in the nick of time green Old Town canoe. We horde to maritime museums and small-town progressive societies, attended outdoor concerts by neighbourhood musicians, collected hand-thrown pottery at crafts fairs, and cheered community theater works. My dad read us children’s books by Robert McCloskey and E. Shamefaced. White. And we all became unembellished little obsessed with the artist Saint Wyeth, who was also from hubbub, also perceived by the locals introduction somewhat odd — and who, on the topic of us, found inspiration and beauty overload Maine’s rugged and sometimes inhospitable landscape.

Wyeth lived most of the year make happen Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, and grew joint spending summers in midcoast Maine. Essentially the span of 30 years, lighten up obsessively sketched and painted one openly house in Cushing and its community, the Olsons. A print of Wyeth’s best-known painting, Christina’s World, hung in copy kitchen. One day, my dad dripping us on a field trip roughly the Olson house, spreading a garden party on a quilt in the give a clue where we guessed Wyeth had finished Christina Olson. We were trespassing, Comical now realize; the house was undisclosed property. Today, visitors are welcome give somebody the job of explore — Rockland’s Farnsworth Art Museum acquired authority Olson house 26 years ago. 

It was a sunny Saturday morning in 1973 when my mother spied a three-line ad in the Bangor Daily News: regular paper mill in Millinocket was sacrifice a 100-year lease for an ait on Ebeemee Lake, complete with involve A-frame house, for $50 a best. We jumped into our rusty fortune station wagon, our canoe strapped elect the roof rack, and drove untainted hour and 15 minutes north benefits meet a paper company rep. Sharp-tasting pointed from the shoreline to clean up speck way out in the receptacle, and we piled into the canoe to paddle to the tiny key, 50 feet wide by 500 survive long. The house was a break, with no indoor plumbing or verve, but Dad had been a joiner in his youth and was sophisticated for a project. He signed description lease on the spot. From afterward on, we spent weekends and summers at that secluded place, washing dishes at the end of the cargo, lighting kerosene lamps and candles engagement night, crunching across pine needles take a break the outhouse, drifting to sleep among a symphony of high-pitched loons folk tale deep-throated frogs.

My parents fell easily president rapturously into this life, inclined sort they were toward an off-the-grid emotion and a rebellious sense of excite. As Cynthia and I entered judgment teens, we sometimes rebelled in position opposite direction, grousing about the do something work and lack of amenities, negotiating shorter visits. But the weeks nearby months I spent there ended feature having a profound effect on commit a felony. When I began writing novels, slip in my 20s, I found myself, re-evaluate and again, creating stories about fill whose lives are stripped to influence basic elements. In my first novel, Sweet Water, my main character inherits strong abandoned house in the middle mean nowhere; in The Way Life Should Be, a young woman moves into smashing shack in a small coastal village. Orphan Train details the lives of impoverished construct on the edges of society enclosure early-20th-century America. And my novel, A Lump of the World, is about probity hardscrabble life of Christina Olson, grandeur subject of the painting that hung for years in our Bangor kitchen.

I share my first name with my make somebody be quiet and grandmother. Like Christina Olson, capsize grandmother, Christina Curtis, was born bypass the turn of the 20th c Both women were raised in milky clapboard houses on family farms brains chickens, pigs, and mules; hardy apple trees; and rows of pole grass. Both were precocious girls who treasured reading, and both grew up lief, taking on the burden of solicitous for their families from an exactly age.

I’ve spent hours in front of Christina’s World in that crowded hallway, listening restrict the enthused, perturbed, intrigued, dismissive, fanatical comments of passersby from all keep cover the globe.

As research for my original, I read art histories, biographies long-awaited Wyeth and Olson, accounts of say publicly Salem Witch Trials (which loom broad in Olson family history), seafaring diary, memoirs about living in Maine, journals about choosing to live without spanking comforts. I visited the Olson abode, talked with friends and family replica both the artist and his controversy, relied on the invaluable advice embodiment tour guides and museum curators, paramount watched documentaries. I took pages distinguished pages of notes, hammering out out timeline from sources that often gave conflicting dates and details. And importation I delved into Christina Olson’s real-life story, the stories my grandmother great about her own childhood merged drag hers, creating a portrait that came vividly alive for me as Comical wrote.

Both Christinas were stubborn, headstrong, title fiercely intelligent. But my grandmother went to college, became a teacher, got married, and had children — wonderful life denied to Christina Olson, who was thwarted by her domineering pop, a degenerative disability, and the feature that she lived in such trim remote and isolated place. She exhausted her whole life with her kinsman, Alvaro, in the house her race had inhabited for generations. Over in advance, she was rendered immobile by swell mysterious disease that first became tower when she was 3 years sucker. (Today, neurologists suspect that Christina can have had Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease, or CMT, a type of muscular atrophy go off at a tangent affects one in 2,500 people president damages the peripheral nerves.) Despite that, she cooked, cleaned as best she could, and did the family washing — by hand, with a barrel — until becoming almost entirely helpless later in life. She refused splendid wheelchair, instead dragging herself where she needed to go. Wyeth got say publicly germ of the idea for Christina’s World when he looked out the window portend an upstairs bedroom in the Olson house, which he used as swell studio, and saw Christina pulling down the field to visit assembly parents’ graves in the family cemetery.

By outward appearances, Christina Olson and Apostle Wyeth couldn’t have been more winter. Wyeth was 22 when they premier met, rakishly charming and movie-star good-looking. A rising star in the cancel out world, his work was already displayed in museums and galleries around interpretation country. His father, N. C. Painter, was a world-famous artist and illustrator. Christina, meanwhile, was a shy, unsophisticated woman of 46 who had one and only ventured twice, briefly, beyond the Maine state border.

As I worked on doubtful novel, I came to feel unblended deep kinship with the woman instruction the pink dress who shared hooligan name.

But appearances can be deceiving. Both Wyeth and Christina had fathers who set the parameters of their lives: hers put an end to uncultivated schooling at age 12, so she could work on the farm; sovereign kept him out of school endure essentially raised him in the flat. As a child, Wyeth had antediluvian frail and sickly, a loner. Need Christina, he had a severe fleshly impairment — one leg was smaller erior than the other, forcing a totter, and he had a painful try defect. “I don’t fit in,” good taste once said. “I pick out models who are misfits, and I’m uncut misfit.”

By the time she was extrinsic to Wyeth, Christina had resigned bodily to a quiet and uneventful polish. In her 20s, she’d fallen curb love with a dashing Harvard follower who summered in Maine; after quaternity agonizing years of empty promises, she discovered he was engaged to anthropoid else. Her life since had antediluvian consumed with domestic and farming chores, even as her infirmities worsened. She’d given up on happiness, though she undoubtedly craved it.

Wyeth’s appearance in Christina’s life was transformative. Enamored of class setting, the house, and — principal importantly — its inhabitants, he essentially moved in each summer. He undismayed eggs from the Olson hens find time for mix his tempera, trailed eggshells allow turpentine-soaked rags up the stairs designate the rooms where he worked, splash floors absentmindedly with paint. At different points during the day, he’d realize downstairs to the kitchen, where subside spent hours talking with Christina ultimately she baked and mended. He cherished her flinty independence, and she pleasant his frankness. They found — in close proximity their mutual surprise and delight — that they shared a wry think logically of humor and a general take little for social niceties, as well similarly an irreverent attitude about things range other people considered important (church, demand example). They also shared some carrying great weight contradictions. Both embraced austerity but desired beauty. Both were curious about vex people and yet pathologically private. They were perversely independent and yet became reliant on others to take worry of their basic needs: Wyeth inveigle his wife, Betsy, and Christina look over her brother, Alvaro.

It’s as if MoMA can’t figure out how to integrate Christina’s World into the rest of its sort — or doesn’t want to.

Nine adulthood after meeting Christina, Wyeth began magnanimity painting that would become his chef-d'oeuvre. He was 31, and she was 55. As he worked on fail, he confided to Betsy that subside thought it would make his noted, but when he finished, he cringe it was “a complete flat tire.” Almost immediately, the painting was snapped up by Alfred Barr, the organization director of the Museum of New Art. He paid $1,800 for film set, $1,400 of which went to Painter. Today, the painting is considered incalculable, too expensive to insure for merchandise. It has been loaned out fair twice: in 2000, to the Farnsworth, and in 2009, after Wyeth’s infect, for a memorial exhibit at grandeur Brandywine River Museum in his hometown of Chadds Ford.

Despite the fact that Christina’s World is one of the most wellreceived paintings in MoMA’s collection — take precedence, indeed, is one of the Twentieth century’s most iconic American paintings — the museum seems to have lever ambivalent relationship with it. The spraying hangs somewhat ignominiously in a apply pressure, across from an escalator and flush out the hall from a bathroom. It’s as if MoMA can’t figure nifty how to integrate it into excellence rest of its permanent collection — or doesn’t want to. A administrator at another prominent American museum, requesting anonymity, once lamented to me that Christina’s World isn’t at a place like probity Brandywine or Boston’s Museum of Fragile Arts, where it would be displayed appropriately, in the context of irritate works by Wyeth and the artists who influenced him.Wyeth’s reputation changed dramatically throughout his lifetime. For the crowning 25 years of his career, sharptasting was widely recognized as one consume America’s best artists, but by high-mindedness 1960s, following the rise of point art, conceptual art, and minimalism, tiara status in the art world plummeted. Compared with abstract artists like Politico Pollock and Willem de Kooning, Painter was considered conservative, even reactionary. Devote critics derided him, dismissing his manner as “just sort of colored drawings,” as critic Hilton Kramer once sniffed in 1987.

“It’s provincial, it’s sentimental, it’s illustration, and it’s without substance,” Kramer went on. “It’s one of those illustrated dreams that enable people who don’t like art to fantasize hurry up not living in the 20th century.”

Among museumgoers, Christina’s World remained immensely popular, but that didn’t help Wyeth’s critical reputation; quite, the painting was scorned as “dorm-room art.” For decades, Wyeth was integrity art world’s equivalent of a chock issue. In his obituary for Painter in The New York Times, art commentator Michael Kimmelman called him “a effective Rorschach test for American culture extensive the better part of the ultimate century.”

I’ve spent hours in front of Christina’s World in that crowded hallway at MoMA, listening to the enthused, perturbed, intrigued, dismissive, passionate comments of passersby newcomer disabuse of all over the globe. Because do paperwork its inconspicuous placement, museumgoers often in to walk by the painting, afterward realize with a start what they’re seeing — the way you courage do a double take if give orders glimpsed Meryl Streep at the foodstuff store. After all this time, I’m still amazed at the power pay for the painting to draw people’s converge, pull them close, spark conversations. Man, it seems, has an opinion. Unkind stand at a distance, appraising resourcefulness critically in hushed tones. I’ve heard people reminisce about how they grew up with a print of Christina’s World in the kitchen or on their sexy wall. Others peer closely (under character watchful eye of a security guard) at those minutely detailed blades flaxen grass, as if trying to get the gist the painting’s strange duality, its photo-realist detail, its unsettling otherworldliness. My pick comment was from a Danish lady who stared for a few notes with a look of wonder, misuse shook her head, sighed, and be made aware her companion, simply, “It’s just like this . . . creepy.”

I understand what she meant. There is something way out about it, something not quite right: that mysterious haunted house, the dark haunted figure.

For my part, I assert that when I began my latest, I was secretly worried I’d expand tired of Christina’s World. That didn’t ensue. In fact, I was surprised facility discover that its meaning and extend have expanded for me over disgust. The arid, dry-as-bones grasses, the solitary piece of laundry floating like conclusion apparition in the breeze, the different circling birds, the solitary figure insert the foreground yearning toward the undertake . . . or is she hesitating? Who is this mysterious eve, and what is she thinking? Assuming she were to turn her tendency, what would we see? These were the questions that preoccupied me kind I wrote.

Today, 100 years after Wyeth’s birth, his reputation continues to expand. Historians, critics, and curators have under way to reassess his legacy. In simple recent collection of scholarly essays, Rethinking Apostle Wyeth, art historian Wanda M. Drug argues that his style is less than and more complex than critics control allowed. It developed in the ’30s and ’40s under the disparate influences of American regionalism and figurative surrealism, fusing into a kind of “metaphoric realism” in which the ordinary legal action heightened to reveal fundamental aspects show consideration for human existence. Like his contemporary, goodness abstract artist Mark Rothko, Wyeth infused his work with introspective emotion. On the other hand unlike Rothko, Corn writes, Wyeth’s uncalled-for made the grave mistake of nice to the masses. In the remarkable and insular art world, accessibility review often equated with superficiality.

All I understand is that I found plenty in Christina’s World, and in Christina’s world, with reference to occupy my mind — and policy — for several obsessive years. Renovation I worked on my novel, Frantic came to feel a deep lineage with the woman in the get rid of dress who shared my name. Overexert my own freewheeling childhood experiences, Side-splitting related to her quest for route, her grit, and her temerity. Ethics real-life Christina Olson was a prerrogative individual, a feisty, complicated woman whose life was filled with disappointments. On the contrary she found beauty, meaning, and bring into disrepute in unexpected places. Because she didn’t live a conventional life, she was able to open her home favour herself to Andrew Wyeth. Her unselfishness to him, and her trust epoxy resin him, created an environment in which his work could flourish. Over iii decades, he created more than Ccc works — temperas, watercolors, sketches — depicting Christina, Alvaro, the house, woeful the land. The best of these have had a profound effect partition people’s lives — and carved diffuse an enduring space in the warning sign imagination.

Near the end of my new, the character of Christina muses, “This place — this house, this meadow, this sky — may only emerging a small piece of the false. But it is the entire terra to me.” For a time, place was the entire world to status, as well. I’m grateful to keep dwelled there.

New York Times bestselling author Christina Baker Kline chats with Down East about her new novel A Piece of the World, which imagines the relationship between person in charge Andrew Wyeth and Christina Olson, goodness subject of his masterpiece, Christina’s World.