"As popular paintings go, 'Christina’s World' is remarkable for being so dark and humorless..."

"... yet the public seemed to focus less on its gothic and morose quality and more on 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."

Really? I think people — even all those ordinary people who make up the substance of popularity — responded to the sadness and loneliness. Later, when photo-realism made the grade with elites, what were they focusing on?

***

Andrew Wyeth, dead at age 91.

You can see "Christina's World" at the Museum of Modern Art in NYC.