The Unreachable House of the Olsons

Frescoes, hinged panel paintings, and cupolas had become rare; increasingly, the art of painting consisted in inscribing a character or a story within a rectangular space. In middle class homes, the product was hung on a wall, sometimes set within moldings that were themselves rectangular. Even large crowd scenes or battles were forced to shrink in order to fit within four-sided polygons. This rhetorical rule governed – and in part still governs – image-based narrative in the Western world. The Unreachable House of the Olsons, Giovanni Mariotti’s inaugural effort in his recurring column “Rectangular Views,” makes it clear that the composition of a painting, the manipulation of the distance between a human figure and a house, the blending of a young woman’s body with skeletal arms and legs, all allow a transition from reality to its dreamlike interpretation. The work in question is Christina’s World by Andrew Wyeth: perhaps the most popular painting by any American artist of the twentieth century, along with American Gothic by Grant Wood.