Word: helga
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Fluffily hyped, Andrew Wyeth' s Helga pictures go on view at the National Gallery and prove to be too much of a medium- good thing...
...WHAT THE HELGA?? was the headline on the New Republic Editor Michael Kinsley's story about last summer's convulsions over Andrew Wyeth. The question stands. Never in the history of American art had a group of paintings been so fluffily hyped. Rarely in the history of cultural journalism had magazines and newspapers that one might have expected to be fairly hard-nosed about such matters -- TIME, Newsweek, the New York Times and so on across the nation -- made so much of so little...
Like an avalanche of Styrofoam and saccharin, the Great Human Interest Saga of Andrew Wyeth and Helga Testorf, the German nymph of Chadds Ford, Pa., came roaring down the narrow defiles of silly-season journalism and obliterated the meager factual content of the story. Here, one learned, was a treasure, a secret cache of hundreds of paintings and drawings of a mystery blond done between 1971 and 1985 by America's dynastic culture hero, unbeknown to his wife, never exhibited, possibly the record of a love affair, bought en bloc for millions by a neophyte collector...
...course it turned out that pictures of Helga, far from being secret, had been reproduced and exhibited for several years without evoking any special interest; that far from knowing nothing of them, Betsy Wyeth -- whose astute managerial sense has had much to do with her husband's success over the years -- owned quite a few; that there was no love affair; that the collector was a newsletter publisher named Leonard E.B. Andrews, who planned to reap ^ vast profits from selling reproductions of Helga's pale and sturdy torso; and that the whole thing had been cooked up among...
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...