One of the most iconic works in American art – the painting “Christina’s World” – currently hangs in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City as a prized piece of Americana and one of the museum’s most popular exhibits. In his artwork, Andrew Wyeth, a master of American realism, honors a dear friend, a woman who is today both an icon and a true medical mystery.
Since the first public viewing of this famed painting in 1948, the nature of the disabling disease afflicting the eponymous Christina has been the subject of vigorous debate among art historians and physicians alike. The painting depicts a young woman, thin of frame with emaciated limbs, lying in a sun-dappled field and reaching longingly towards a gray farmhouse on a distant hill. The painting is carefully rendered with finely-wrought strokes detailing individual blades of grass and strands of the subject’s hair, tousled by the wind (1).
