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\u201cChristina\u2019s World,\u201d 1948, by Andrew Wyeth. Credit: Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York<\/p>\nFor years, access to the vast field across the street from the Olson House in Cushing was handled in the same way as many privately owned but undeveloped areas across Maine long have been: It wasn\u2019t that you couldn\u2019t walk out there and see the same view that Andrew Wyeth painted in 1948 of Christina Olson looking back up the hill toward the home she lived in with her brother. No one was going to arrest you for trespassing or anything if you wandered off the road to take a look, but it wasn\u2019t explicitly allowed either. Paths were mowed, including one that allowed public access to the cemetery at the foot of the fields, overlooking Maple Juice Cove, where both Christina and Alvaro Olson and Andrew and Betsy Wyeth are buried. The management, as it were, was a bit ad hoc, however. During some summers, no one in the community was quite sure who was supposed to do the mowing.<\/p>\n
This year, as the grass grows taller there will be a much surer plan for keeping paths mowed \u2014 and for adding new signage and more, too. Because for the first time ever (or at the very least since \u201cChristina\u2019s World\u201d was painted in 1948), the Olson Field is now open to the public.<\/p>\n
In the years since Betsy Wyeth\u2019s death in 2020, the family\u2019s nonprofit, the Wyeth Foundation for American Art, has been unraveling her estate, with many of the Wyeths\u2019 Maine properties being donated or sold to organizations that can both maintain them as art historical sites and allow varying degrees of public access, too. \u201cWe are not a land steward, to put it simply,\u201d said Laura West, executive director of the foundation. In 2022, Allen and Benner Islands, where the Wyeths\u2019 final summer home was located, were acquired by Colby College for long-term stewardship. And in March, the 16-acre Olson Field property, which was also owned by the Wyeths, was donated by the foundation to the Georges River Land Trust.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt wasn\u2019t like the family was turning people away from visiting the field,\u201d said Maeve Cosgrove, community engagement manager at Georges River Land Trust. \u201cThe turning point is now that we can now invite the community in.\u201d<\/p>\n
It was Betsy who first showed Andrew the Olson House, which she once described as \u201clooming up like a weathered ship stranded on a hilltop,\u201d and it had been part of her summers in Cushing since she was 10 years old. In 1939, 22-year-old Andrew came to Cushing to visit her family\u2019s summer home in order to meet Betsy and her two sisters. She was the youngest, only 17, but as the story goes, Andrew and Betsy hit it off, and she took him to meet siblings Christina and Alvaro Olson at the house (though maybe only to see how he\u2019d respond to the rough lives they lived, particularly Christina, who was paralyzed from the waist down but refused to use a wheelchair). Whatever the reason, that day changed the Wyeths\u2019 lives forever: Betsy and Andrew were married the following year, and Andrew would spend the next three decades painting in and around the Olson House when the couple came to the Midcoast from Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, in the summers, making nearly 300 works there.<\/p>\n
\u201cI just couldn\u2019t stay away from there,\u201d Andrew once said of the Olson property. \u201cI did other pictures while I knew them but I\u2019d always seem to gravitate back to the house \u2026 It was Maine.\u201d<\/p>\n
By far the most famous piece Andrew made at the Olson House is \u201cChristina\u2019s World,\u201d which is not only the most recognizable painting in his vast body of work, but one of the most recognizable images in all of American art. But the vast scope of the Olson House paintings and drawings, and the unique relationship with Christina and Alvaro that the Wyeths developed over the years show how the Olson property represented far more than the backdrop of one major work.<\/p>\n
\u201cChristina\u2019s World,\u201d 1948, by Andrew Wyeth. Credit: Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was part of her \u2014 part of what she loved, part of what she did when she came back to Maine in the summer,\u201d Amy Morey said of Betsy\u2019s relationship with the field and the home. Morey started working for the Wyeths as the manager of their Maine collection of art over 20 years ago, and continues that work today as the collections manager at the Andrew & Betsy Wyeth Study Center at the Farnsworth Art Museum. \u201cShe loved to walk, and the fields were part of that when she was in Cushing. She spent a lot of time walking in the fields, birding, blueberrying\u00a0in the summertime.\u201d<\/p>\n
Morey would sometimes drive down to Cushing with Betsy so that they could walk the field together, but Betsy never fully articulated to Morey what the Olson property meant to her, even after Andrew\u2019s death. \u201cI think when you live with something it\u2019s sort of automatic that you know \u2014 you don\u2019t have to say it, you don\u2019t have to explain it,\u201d Morey said of her longtime boss and friend\u2019s relationship to the field. \u201cIt\u2019s just part of what you experience when you visit there, and you don\u2019t have to put words to it.\u201d<\/p>\n
The land trust is working closely with the Farnsworth, which acquired the Olson House itself in 1992, to establish the new preserve. Visitors to the field can use the parking lot behind the house, which is still undergoing a long-running renovation and is closed to the public. The trails will be maintained in part thanks to a $10,000 endowment for mowing made by the Wyeth Foundation, and will open up access to the shoreline at the site, including a small island that\u2019s accessible by foot at low tide. Interpretive signage will address not only the cultural significance of the field, but its ecology, too \u2014 it\u2019s a prime birding spot, both for grassland species and wading birds down along the shore. One thing you won\u2019t find, however, is any kind of sign that says \u201cANDREW WYETH STOOD HERE.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s not our business to say that sort of thing because it would be misleading \u2014 it\u2019s not the way the painting was crafted,\u201d said Chris Brownawell, the director of the Farnsworth. Andrew Wyeth first came up with the idea for the piece not when he was looking up at the house from the vantage point of the painting, but when he was looking out over the field from the attic room he used as a studio during the summertime, and saw Christina dragging herself across the grass. The image is very much a reflection of place, but very much a fiction, too. Still, Brownawell realizes that people are going to go down and try to find the view that looks like Andrew\u2019s nonetheless, so that they can take a picture of themselves. \u201cBut that\u2019s fine,\u201d he said, \u201cthat brings the story of Wyeth \u2014 the story of the Olsons, the story of the house, the story of the field \u2014 to life. And we\u2019re delighted that the public will have access to really become part of that iconic work in American art.\u201d<\/p>\n
Standing in the field, it becomes apparent pretty quickly that the view of the painting doesn\u2019t really exist \u2014 you can\u2019t be looking straight-on at the gable of the barn and still see the house from that exact three-quarter angle. Never mind the road, which Andrew probably left out, and the pines, which have probably grown up since 1948. Still, there are times when you can learn so much from seeing the environment that an artist existed within. Like Claude Monet\u2019s Giverny or Georgia O\u2019Keefe\u2019s home in Abiqui\u00fa, the Olson House puts Andrew Wyeth into context. And looking up at the house from the field, it\u2019s abundantly clear that he wasn\u2019t some overwrought gothic as some of his critics have made him out to be over the years \u2014 he was mostly painting what was there in front of him, mostly as he saw it.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think it\u2019s tremendous that it brings that particular painting back to the foreground,\u201d Morey said of people being able to go out into the field now. \u201cYou can see where it\u2019s placed \u2014 you can see the sky, you can hear the wind. It comes alive for you.\u201d<\/p>\n