Art Shay photograph: Fallen Woman, 1949, photo Courtesy of Gallery VICTOR and the Art Shay Archive
Browsing through Chicago Accent, a collection of mid-century urban photography by Art Shay (1922-2018), I came across this photo — and my art history sense started tingling. Sure enough, it seems to be no coincidence: Shay’s 1949 image Fallen Woman is apparently a cheeky parody of Andrew Wyeth’s 1948 painting, Christina’s World. (On the auction site Artsy.net, the photo is even parenthetically subtitled “Homage to Wyeth.”) The painting is iconic today, but it was little known at the time that Shay made his photo, which makes the homage all the more remarkable.
Shay’s image seems a bit funny at first, a “city mouse” spoof of “country mouse” Wyeth’s portrait of willful resolve (Wyeth’s inspiration was a neighbor with a muscular disorder who was determined to crawl around her property rather than resort to a wheelchair), but the photo gets more serious as you delve into it. Whereas Wyeth’s painting is immaculately composed and set on a gentle rural slope, its subject surrounded by yellowing grasses, the black-and-white concrete milieu and vertical framing of Shay’s picture lend it a gritty reality more like snapshot photojournalism. The sense of anxiety and yearning in the Wyeth comes from the daunting distance between Christina and the sheltering house on the horizon; in Shay’s photo, the anxiety arises from its toppled subject being, if anything, too close — to the busy street, to the shuttered, unwelcoming building, and to the blurry male onlookers in the distance.
Christina’s World (1948) by Andrew Wyeth, MOMA, NY
The vague title of the Wyeth, which does not explicitly reveal its subject’s disability, lends an air of mystery to the painting, but there’s a sense that, after some effort, Christina will eventually reach the distant farmhouse, in which she presumably resides. Shay’s punning title suggests his unnamed subject is a sex worker; she’s vulnerable (did she fall or was she pushed?), and there’s no indication of where she can go to find shelter or support. If Shay was noted, as the Artsy website says, for his “humor and compassion” and “keen interest in the city’s working class,” then he perhaps had as much empathy for this “fallen woman” as Wyeth did for Christina.
With thanks to Gallery VICTOR and the Art Shay Archives, Chicago.