Word: wyeth
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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...
...show is a record of 15 years of work with one model at a depth of detail that would be utterly fascinating with a greater artist -- a Manet, a Degas or even a Winslow Homer -- but that at Wyeth's level of achievement seems almost tiresome. The bulk of the show is pencil sketches and watercolors, grouped around a dozen or so finished images in drybrush and tempera. To study an artist's sketches is to go behind the scenes of his talent, to see how the mechanisms of his pictorial thought work; one sees each twist in the evolution...
...time is past when one could dismiss Wyeth as nothing more that a sentimental illustrator, as critics irked by his popular appeal regularly did a decade or more ago. True, his work is grounded in illustration and often fails to transcend it. Not a few of the images of Helga lying naked on a bed or tramping resolutely through the snow in her Loden coat have the banal neatness of things done for a women's magazine. Some of them, like the technically impressive watercolor In the Orchard, 1974, are as deadly in their "sensitiveness" as greeting cards. But there...
...surprises are few and far between. What one gets instead is a soothing reliability of product -- the familiar "world of Wyeth," which has such a vast following in America and has lately acquired a smaller one in the Soviet Union, no doubt because his version of American landscape (bare birches, patches of snow, brown stubble, rocks and iced-up puddles, all under a white sky) looks so like Siberia. To gauge how the roots of his imagination go, one need only compare his painting of the nude Helga with a black ribbon round her neck, face averted, floating...