The most reproduced woman in American painting has her back to us. In Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World, a figure lies in a bleached field, propped on two thin arms, her gaze fixed on a gray farmhouse she cannot walk to. When Lena Dunham lowered herself into that same Maine grass and posted the picture, she joined a quiet procession of visitors who have learned the pose by heart. What almost none of them stops to ask is what the pose is actually holding.

Wyeth’s picture is a study in what an image can refuse to show. The woman in the grass is Anna Christina Olson, his neighbor in Cushing, whose body was failing her: a degenerative condition had taken the use of her legs, and she crossed her own land by crawling rather than accept a wheelchair. Yet the figure on the canvas is slim and unmistakably young, because it was the painter’s wife, Betsy, who posed for the torso. The tenderness everyone loves is built on a substitution. The painting conceals the very difficulty it is about.

That concealment is the whole composition. Everything bends toward the house on the ridge, so that longing arrives as geography, as sheer uphill distance. We are never given her face, only the reach of her arms and the tilt of a head turned away. Wyeth made it in egg tempera, dry and exact, at the height of Abstract Expressionism‘s drips and gestures, and its stillness was its argument. The restraint is not coldness. It is a decision about how much a body should be asked to reveal.

Dunham comes to this image as its temperamental opposite. Her work, from Girls to the confessional memoir and the posts that follow, made an entire method out of exposure, of putting the un-idealized female body and its indignities squarely in the frame and refusing precisely the discretion Wyeth prized. She is finishing a feature for Netflix this year and has long since traded New York for London, but the through-line has never changed: show the thing, especially the thing that is supposed to stay hidden.

So the field becomes an unlikely meeting of two philosophies of the difficult body. Concealment as tenderness on one side; exposure as truth on the other. Neither is automatically the honest one. Wyeth’s grace can read as evasion, a young stand-in smoothing over a real woman’s pain. Dunham’s candor can read as its own kind of performance, difficulty staged for an audience. Set side by side in the same grass, they stop being a celebrity snapshot and become a genuine argument about seeing.

It is an argument the setting now stages daily. The field below the Olson House, kept by the Farnsworth Art Museum and marked a National Historic Landmark, opened to walkers this year, and the regional Maine press has watched a steady stream of them lie down where Christina lay. The house where Wyeth kept a studio, and the family cemetery where he is buried, sit just up the slope. A painting about being unable to move has become a place people travel to, to move through and pose in.

There is nothing cynical in Dunham’s version of it; the pilgrimage is real, and so is the affection. But the ritual keeps editing out the one fact the picture was built around. Christina could not get up from that field. Everyone who reenacts her can. The photograph is the ending the painting spent its stillness refusing to give.

Tags: Andrew Wyeth, Christina's World, Cushing, Lena Dunham, paintings