Word: helgas
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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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 mighty poke...
...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...
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...
...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...
...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...