TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/caps/86/86capart.1

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                h                                                              August 18, 1986

ART

Andrew Wyeth's Stunning Secret


The Helga collection, a hidden treasure trove


Andrew and Betsy Wyeth are the picture of relaxed domesticity
as they welcome a visitor to the lighthouse they call home on
Southern Island, a 22-acre retreat off the coast of Maine.
Tanned and fit, with the kind of face the Romans used to impress
on coins, Wyeth, 69, wears a beige sailor's sweater and beige
twill pants; his silver- blond hair is closely cropped, like any
good sea captain's. Wyeth has been out painting this morning,
as he has done every morning for 50 years. "I'm like a
prostitute," he says, laughing. "I'm never off duty." As he
chats with TIME's Cathy Booth in the living room, Betsy, 64,
bustles about merrily nearby, rattling the dishes and deflecting
phone calls intended for her husband. When the two pose for
pictures, they ham it up with gusto. He kneels to propose
marriage, and she says, "here we are, a couple of old
survivors."

They are indeed:  46 years together as husband and wife. "I was
a cradle snatcher," he notes gleefully of the woman he met when
she was 17. The commitment they display toward each other is
wholly intertwined in their shared devotion to his work--the
spare, meticulous, compassionate vision that has made Wyeth both
a beloved icon to American museumgoers and a nettlesome
anachronism to the art establishment. So the Wyeths are girded
to ride out, with grace and tweaking good humor, the storm of
publicity that broke around them last week, created by a score
of press releases sent out to advertise a scoop in Art &
Antiques magazine.

It was some scoop. For 15 years, from 1970 to 1985, Wyeth had
labored in secret on an enormous collection of works:  246 in
all, including sketches, studies, drawings, 32 watercolors,
twelve drybrush paintings and five temperas. Not even his wife
was aware of the magnitude of the undertaking. Moreover, almost
all of them were of a middle-aged German whom Wyeth identified
only as Helga and who lived near the Wyeths' winter home in
Chadds Ford, Pa. Artist and model met in various places over
the years, and the resulting works, many of them nudes, are
streaked with an intensity both clinical and erotic. Here was
the hidden treasure of a major artist--the most hallowed member
of America's reigning art dynasty--displaying new vigor late in
his career.

But the secrets piled on top of secrets lent a lurid glow that
was not in the paintings. And the Wyeths, inadvertently or
intentionally, added to the titillation. His decision to try
to protect the privacy of Helga made the suspicious more so.
And Art & Antiques reports that when Betsy Wyeth was asked what
the works were about and why her husband had kept them secret,
she took a long, pensive pause and replied, "Love."

Did Betsy mean that the artist, known for his continuing and
intimate relationships with the subjects of his paintings, was
having an affair with his model?  Or could it be that Betsy's
public hint of that affair was part of an elaborate strategy to
woo media attention and thus inflate both the price of the works
and the value of Wyeth's middlebrow eminence?  There were no
immediate, incontrovertible answers, but the story's hold on the
popular imagination proved that Wyeth is still the one artist
whose style and personality can tantalize America. Through
cunning or coincidence, Wyeth is a singular mixture:  old master
and master showman.

In 1948, Christina's World--Wyeth's landscape of a farmhouse,
a hill and the tortured girlish figure at the hill's
base--became an indelible part of postwar America's visual
vocabulary and made the 31-year-old son of Illustrator N.C.
Wyeth a star. As it happens, Christina Olson, Wyeth's neighbor
in Cushing, Me., was no girl (she was 55 at the time), no
delicate sylph. She did not even pose for her most famous
painting; the figure's torso is Betsy's. But the work was
honest in its essentials, and it established Wyeth's world as
a place of physical grandeur and psychic pain. No wonder Betsy
compares her husband to Ingmar Bergman. The American painter
and the Swedish filmmaker are both stern visionaries whose art
is based not on effusion but on reduction--experience purified,
like the flayed skin of a penitent. Both document man's
spiritual solitude. Both listen for the eloquence in things
left unsaid, the static electricity in gestures repressed. In
their work you notice the flint first; you have to get closer
to feel the fire.

Christina's World also helped publicize Wyeth's obsessive
fidelity to the people he painted. As the artist put it last
week, "The more I'm with an object--whether it's model or a
piece of the country--the more I begin to see what I've been
blind to. You start to get what's beneath it. You see deeper
within it." He used Christina and her younger brother Alvaro
as subjects from 1940 to 1968; Anna and Karl Kuerner, Wyeth's
neighbors in Chadds Ford, from 1948 to 1979; teenage Siri
Erickson, another Cushing resident, from 1967 to 1972. The
paintings of her were also withheld, until she turned 21, and
their release in 1975 caused a little of the same stir that the
Helgas have. Siri, now 32 and the mother of two girls, recalls
no embarrassment or awe about posing nude for Wyeth when she was
13. "He would get totally involved in his work. It was is if
you were a tree," she says. "He's a normal, everyday person.
He does paint good, but he's just Andy."

A man of studied reclusiveness, Wyeth once described himself as
"a secretive bastard." He destroys much of his work or paints
over the temperas. "Sometimes," he says, "there are four or
five pictures under the painting." He claims he has even placed
some watercolors in metal tubes and buried them. "I think of
Captain Kidd's buried treasure. They may find it and they may
not." But Wyeth had never buried a treasure so rich, or for so
long, as the Helga booty. According to one source, the artist
would roll a Helga picture inside some other work, then
transport it to a climate-controlled vault at the Brandywine
River Museum in Chadds Ford; only he had the key. Somehow he
managed to keep model and wife completely apart. Though Helga
is employed as a cook and housekeeper by Wyeth's sister Carolyn,
who also has homes in Chadds Ford and Maine, Betsy says she
never visits her sister-in-law. Says Betsy of Helga:  "I never
met her, ever."

In May 1985, Wyeth finally referred to the cache in an interview
with Art & Antiques (see below). That summer Betsy met her
husband at the airport in Rockland, Me., and as their
eggplant-colored Stutz Blackhawk negotiated the trip homeward,
Wyeth told her his story. "I remember the dip in the road,"
Betsy says. "He said, 'Darling, I have something to tell you.
I've given an interview to an interesting man from Art &
Antiques. I mentioned some paintings that no one knows about.
And that's not fair to you.'  And he told me he had been doing
a series. All I really remember is that dip in the road." Both
deny that he was motivated by any sudden fear of death, as some
early accounts had it. Nor, says Betsy, was she completely
shocked by the news. "He's a very secret person. He doesn't
pry in my life and I don't pry in his. And it's worth it. Look
a the paintings. Oh God!  The paintings are remarkable. I
almost dropped dead because of the quality of the work and how
many there were.

During the 15 years, he had been finishing and selling other
paintings at his usual rate of two or three temperas a year.
He had even allowed hints of the Helga collection. Various
friends now believe they saw one or another of the paintings.
In 1980 The Knapsack was used on a poster to promote a French
exhibition of Wyeths. Three of the Helgas were sold in recent
years to various collectors, and he gave Lovers to Betsy in
1982, though she did not realize it was part of such a vast
collection.

Soon after revealing the existence of the whole group to his
wife, who is his undisputed business manager, he gave her two
more as presents. They decided to try quietly to find a buyer
who would keep the remaining 240 works together. They found him
nearby. Leonard E.B. Andrews, a Dallas-born publisher of 19
newsletters, including the National Bankruptcy Report and the
Swine Flue Claim & Litigation Reporter, had a house in Newtown
Square, Pa., had occasionally had dinner with the Wyeths, and
already owned six of his works. After spending two hours with
the collection, Andrews agreed to pay a multimillion-dollar sum
for all of them and their copyrights. Not previously known as
a major collector, he plans to lend the Helgas to museums and,
as if she were the Rambo of art troves, he is even talking of
marketing images of her on posters and calendars. (Told of this
plan, Betsy mutters, "I hope not.")  Andrews rapturously
describes his acquisition as a "national treasure. Wyeth will
go down--I hope he stays up a long time--but history will
remember him as the incredibly finest artist to come out of
America in the 20th century."

Whatever posterity's verdict, Andrews is not alone in his
enthusiasm. "I couldn't believe it, they were so powerful and
beautiful," waxes J. Carter Brown, director of the National
Gallery of Art in Washington, who next May is planning to mount
the first Helga exhibition. "You are looking over the shoulder
of a great master at work." Thomas Hoving, editor in chief of
Connoisseur magazine and the leading impresario of fine-art
hyperbole, proclaims that the group is "unique in art
history--to suddenly have before you this monumental body of
great American painting. It's a might poke, a sharp stick
between the eyes of those who dismiss Wyeth as nostalgic. It's
his weapon, his dissent. He's shouting, 'No one will ever
write me out of history.'"

But there is nothing like unanimity in the assessments of
Wyeth's stature as a modern American artist. Theodore Stebbins,
curator of paintings at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, puts
Wyeth "in a category all by himself. Being what he is brings
up debate on what art is:  realism vs. abstraction. He is a
beautiful draftsman,a brilliant watercolorist, a very fine
painter. In his field, Wyeth is an outstanding figure." Many
critics in the Manhattan art scene, however, find him stubbornly
irrelevant. "Wyeth's philosophy is Poor Richard's Almanack,"
sniffs Henry Geldzahler, former curator of 20th century art at
the Metropolitan Museum of Art. "His skies have no vapor
trails, his people wear no wristwatches. He is the Williamsburg
of American painting--charming, especially when seen from a
helicopter."

And, of course, the art world is buzzing with speculation about
what is not on the canvas. Friends openly debate whether Wyeth
is philandering or faithful. Why did he keep the collection
hidden from his wife?  And why did he wait so long to release
it?  Says Artist George Segal:  "There's an anguish any artist
has between wanting to keep private and wanting to show. It's
internal warfare. Showing new paintings is like dropping your
pants in public."

But now for a moment ignore the tattle, forget the blurbs and
look at the pictures. THe hubbub of controversy is stilled in
the silence that these disquieting portraits demand.
Imputations of Wyeth's motives are lost in the dark nexus where
passion meets craft. Speculation on the course of his
relationship with Helga turns to fascination with the
development of graphic ideas and emotions in studies for final
works. In the first sketch for Overflow, Helga is a thin,
pretty, sleeping girl:  the suggestive lines idealize her. And
yet she breathes with youth and possibility. When the series
is fleshed out, weight and age attach themselves to her, and by
the time Wyeth commits the image to paint she looks calcified,
statuesque, a squaw totem placed on its side. But no:  there
is a hint of life and movement. Helga's hip has curled out of
its confining sheet, perhaps in response to the sound of the
cascade outside her window that gives the work its title.
Following the gestation from sketch to drybrush is like flipping
through a family album of Atget X rays.

In Lovers, all the movement is in nature. Sunlight and a breeze
rush in through the window; a leaf has just sailed past the sill
and stops for a moment to have its picture taken. Helga is
perched on a stool, her body erect, her fingers splayed under
her haunches, her head averted toward her shadow on the wall,
or toward an unseen lover. The work's title teases meaning out
of enigma. Who are the lovers? Helga and the unseen figure?
The model and her shadow?  The artist and his model?

Every artist undresses his subject, whether human or still life.
It is his business to find essences in surfaces, and what more
attractive and challenging surface than the skin around a soul?
No proof of cupidity there. This, at least, was the feeling
of Wyeth's fiercely protective neighbors in Chadds Ford as they
were besieged by reporters last week. The locals understand the
artist-model relationship, and they figure they know Andy Wyeth.
So dismissive are they of any charge of infidelity that they
are willing to entertain--and be entertained by--the possibility
of a Wyeth scam. "This whole thing could be a ploy," said Karl
J. Kuerner III, who lives on top of Kuerner Hill, where Wyeth
frequently sketched his grandparents. An employee at the
Brandywine called it the "best stunt I've ever seen."

Despite the professions of ignorance by most of Helga's
neighbors, reporters eventually found her house across the road
from the Kuerners', learned that her name is Helga Testorf, that
she is now 54 and that she is married with four children and two
grandchildren. (A daughter, Carmen, figures in a few works in
the Helga series.)  Her teenage son has been guarding the
property and turning away reporters, and the tension weighing
on him was visible. He was near tears as he said he wanted to
protect his mother from being hurt. Told she was the subject for
a famous artist's work, he said, "It doesn't do me any good,
does it?" Helga, a fugitive from her sudden notoriety, was not
to be seen. Carolyn Wyeth describes this quiet, almost
reclusive woman as extremely upset by the tumult but flattered
by the paintings:  "She thinks they're wonderful." The
neighbors' sympathy for her, though, is no match for their
affection for Andy Wyeth. What he did for love, they say, is
paint.

One art professional who knows both Wyeths finds multiple
meanings in Betsy's use of the word:  "It means his live of
creating and being an artist. It means his self-esteem and his
need to break new ground. It means the love of theater and
drama, which has always been a part of his life. It does not
mean that he was having an affair with Helga. Oh, yes, Betsy
knew that using the work love would make the wags wag. They
both have a marvelous way of teasing. But if he were having an
affair, she would be the last one to go public about it. She
would be protective of herself. And he would not want it to be
presumed that he was having an affair with any of his models.
When he finds a model relationship that fires up creative
energy, he finds that very, very exciting. And that's all that
happened with Helga."

Back on Southern Island, Wyeth has turned away most requests
for interviews, but did meet with TIME's Booth last Thursday.
He declines to discuss Helga or her paintings, but he wants to
clarify Betsy's use of word love in relation to them. "People
are going to think, particularly with this group of paintings,
that it's a sexual love. It's not. We think of love only as
two human beings in love. But it isn't in love. It's love.
It's love toward an object. It can be a love toward those
shells," he says, pointing nearby. "It's a love of warmth, of
finding something precious. It's like a wonderful animal, a dog
that will come up and sit in your lap and you pet its head.
This is something we've lost. A lot of people will take my
wife's statement wrong, but I think it's very beautiful and
real."

The week's turmoil has punctured the couple's routine, such as
it is. "There are no rules in my work," he says. "I don't
really have studios. I wander around--around people's attics,
out in fields, in cellars, any place I find that excites me.
I dream a lot. I do more painting when I'm not painting. It's
in the subconscious. I begin to see an emotion building up in
my mind before I ever put it down on the panel. Sometimes when
there is great tension, or lots taking place, I may get an idea
or an emotion, and it hits me strong. It can be a tree, or the
tone of a shadow of clouds on the ground, or light on the side
of a hill, or light on a white surface. Sometimes I do my best
work after the models have gone away, purely from memory. And
that's what makes me laugh when critics say I'm photographic.
I'm not photographic at all. Nothing against the camera, but
it doesn't work with me."

An artist is part camera, of course:  he is the seer, adjusting
technical and emotional focus to find a unique approach to the
thing seen. Equally, he is reluctant to open the aperture on
objects of his inspiration. In two hours, Wyeth has not
mentioned Helga's name, referring to her only once as the "young
lady." About the Helga series he will say only, "I feel--not
all--but there are a number of paintings in there that are as
penetrating as anything I've ever done." Asked if he thinks it
comprises his best work, Wyeth stares out toward Penobscot Bay
and replies, "I won't say it's my best work, but its
intensity...well, I don't think I can answer that."

Betsy's laugh precedes her as she joins her husband. The last
phone call was from their son Jamie, the third generation of
Wyeth artists. "There must be some awful things said about
said," she mock-confides to Wyeth. Andrew's mood clears
instantly, and he nods toward their inquisitive guest:  "She
asked me all about our sex life." And what did you say?  Betsy
wants to know. "Twice weakly," he winks in reply. "Do you know
how to spell it?"

They stand outside in the haze, on the balding knoll where
their house rests. The trees list permanently to the north,
made arthritic by the wind. Figures in a Wyeth
landscape--except for the yardarm, with flourishing skull and
crossbones, that towers wickedly behind the house. In a moment
the artist is off on another ramble, toward a new attic or field
or relationship or controversy. More than likely, he will
wander back to Betsy. She calls Wyeth "you old pirate"; he must
know she is the anchor.

--By Richard Corliss. Reported by Cathy Booth/Southern Island,
Dean Brelis/New York, and Jeanne McDowell/Chadds Ford

---------------------------------------------------------------
The Making of a Scoop

Like most reporters who have snared a tough interview, Jeffrey
Schaire came armed and ready for his one-on-one session with
Andrew Wyeth. He had boned up on the artist's wok and even
recalled verses from Emily Dickinson in an effort to prod his
reclusive subject. But nothing could have prepared the
journalist for Wyeth's startling disclosure. Midway through the
90-minute interview, after a moment of thought, Wyeth said
matter-of-factly, "There's a whole vast amount of my work no one
knows about. Not even my wife."

That quiet revelation--quoted in the September 1985 issue of Art
& Antiques magazine--triggered a chain of events that led to
last week's shellburst of interest in the artist's secret Helga
collection. As the art community focused its attention on Wyeth
and his mystery model, the spotlight was shared by the magazine
that first got on to the story. TV crews and reporters swarmed
over its modest, fifth-floor headquarters on Manhattan's lower
Fifth Avenue. The rush of phone calls was so overwhelming at one
point that the lights on the switchboard simply conked out.

What Schaire proudly describes as the "little magazine that
could" was born in 1978, but took its current form in 1984,
after it was purchased by Texas Publisher Wick Allison. He set
out to create an art magazine that would appeal not just to art
insiders, but to the general public as well. With its glossy
new look, Art & Antiques has seen its circulation jump from
23,000 to 98,000. Still, seat-of-the-pants remains the typical
mode of operation. The bare-bones staff of 27 routinely works
a seven-day week, and sometimes even dresses up in period
costumes to pose for photo layouts.

With well-known contributors like William F. Buckley and Joyce
Carol Oats, Art & Antiques has gained a reputation for
provocative reporting. One article last year raised questions
(still unresolved) about the authenticity of the Antioch
chalice, purchased by New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art and
purported to have been used by Jesus at the Last Supper. A few
months ago, a man speaking broken English wandered into the
magazine's offices. He turned out to be carrying slides
smuggled out of the Soviet Union showing works from the Pushkin
Museum of Fine Arts never before seen in the West.

Landing the Wyeth interview was "pure dumb luck," says Schaire,
32, the magazine's energetic executive editor, whose first art
job was driving a forklift for the Metropolitan Museum's
gift-shop warehouse. He requested the interview by letter in
November 1984 (enclosing a copy of the magazine with a cover
story on, coincidentally, "Winslow Homer's Mystery Woman"). Six
months later a Wyeth intermediary replied that the publicity-shy
artist would agree to talk.

Wyeth's disclosure, tucked unobtrusively into the fourth
paragraph of the magazine's story, created hardly a ripple. It
was exactly a year, and the September 1986 issue of Art &
Antiques, before the import of Wyeth's remarks became strikingly
clear. The closing of the circle came last April, when Schaire
was visiting Pennsylvania for another story and met with Peter
Ralston, a photographer and friend of the Wyeths'. Ralston told
him to get in the car, he had a "surprise" to show him. An hour
later, Schaire was poring over the 240 works that are now the
talk of the art world.

--By Richard Zoglin. Reported by John Moody/New York.