Word: wyeth
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...eyes. Mzungu is Swahili for white man. The visitor feels the chill of a savage attention. At last the Polaroid develops itself fully. The lion turns and lies in full view, spreading the beige grass and lying precisely in the posture of the woman in the grass in Andrew Wyeth's painting Christina's World. The grasses in Wyeth's dream and the grasses garnishing the lion have the same color and texture. But whereas Wyeth's Christina was crippled and lay in an unforgettable posture of longing, of groping, the lion, his hindquarters lazing off on one side...
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 work 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...
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...