PAINTED VOID

The emptiness at the core of desire is nothing short of terrifying

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Andrew Wyeth’s masterpiece Christina’s World (1948) gave birth to a whole series of more optimistic versions—so many attempts to cancel its traumatic impact. Two exemplary new versions are photographer Alex Thompson’s tribute to Christina’s World, taken in 2005 at the site of the Olson house in South Cushing, Maine, and the Modern Recreation of Christina's World by Wyeth (30" x 40", acrylics, paintingsbyjoshua.com). The main feature of these new versions is the use of much more lively colours, which obfuscate the monotone grey-brown tones of the original. One should also mention another key fact: the two buildings we see in the background are moved much closer together, with almost no space between them.

Why is this last feature so important? Read properly, it belies the predominant interpretation of the painting, according to which “Wyeth portrays the countryside as an escape, an arcadia. Christina leans toward her farmhouse. She longs to be home again; she wants us to come with her.” Really? The gap between the two buildings forms the lower part of a screen onto which we expect the crawling woman to project her fantasies—it is this frame, not the two buildings of her home, that attracts Christina. And yet, the frame remains empty. Wyeth-the-realist, working in the age of Rothko and Pollock, was right to claim that he is also an abstractionist: its colours and formal dispositions are more important than the painted content.

Let us draw another analogy here: consider the uniqueness of Jacques-Louis David’s The Death of Marat, described as “the first modernist painting” by T. J. Clark. The oddity of the painting’s overall structure is seldom noted: its upper half is almost totally black. (This is not a realistic detail—the room in which Marat actually died had lively wallpaper.) What does this black void stand for? The opaque body of the People? The impossibility of representing the People? It is as if the opaque background of the painting (the People) invades it, occupying its entire upper half.

What happens here is structurally homologous to a formal procedure often found in film noir and Orson Welles movies, where the discord between figure and background is mobilized. When a figure moves in a room, the effect is that the two are somehow ontologically separated, as in a clumsy rear-projection shot where one can clearly see that the actor is not really in the room but merely moving in front of a screen onto which the image of a room is projected. In The Death of Marat, it appears as if we see Marat in his bathtub in front of a dark screen onto which the fake background has not yet been projected. This is why the effect can also be described as one of anamorphosis: we see the figure while the background remains an opaque stain. To see the background, we would have to blur the figure. However, what is impossible is to bring both the figure and the background into the same focus.Is this not also the logic of the Jacobin Terror? Individuals must be annihilated to make the People visible; the People’s Will can be made visible only through the terrorist destruction of an individual’s body. Therein resides the uniqueness of The Death of Marat: it concedes that one cannot blur the individual to represent the People directly. All one can do to approximate an image of the People is to show the individual at the point of their disappearance—their tortured, mutilated dead body against the blurred background that “is” the People.