Christina's Sacrifice

Andrew Wyeth’s painting Christina’s World (1948) depicts a woman crawling through a field and gazing towards a farmhouse on a hill. In the penultimate scene in Andrei Tarkovsky’s final film The Sacrifice (1986), the protagonist’s wife collapses in a puddle while her home burns down in front of her. Wyeth and Tarkovsky were American and Soviet contemporaries dealing with similar themes and iconography, but there is no evidence of contact between them.

Splayed in the foreground of this scene is the Cowgirl. Grotesque, cartoonishly sexualized and creature-like, the denim-clad figure may be a sardonic yet sincere parody of the artist herself, as a body inherently complicit in the delusions of society. She yearns with her warped body toward the farmhouse, in an act of longing for that which remains out of reach.