Word: testorf
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...Soon it emerged that the woman was Helga Testorf, a married housekeeper for Wyeth's sister Carolyn in Chadds Ford. Wyeth's wife Betsy claimed to have known nothing about the pictures. When she was asked what she thought was the motive behind them, she offered a melodramatic one-word reply: "Love." However they came to light, their "discovery" and the suggestion that they represented some secret love affair was news that got them on the cover of TIME and Newsweek and then a big exhibition at the National Gallery of Art in Washington...
Executed during a 15-year span from 1971 to 1985, the suite of drawings focuses exclusively on a single model, Wyeth's neighbor Helga Testorf of Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania...
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...
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...
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