Word: wyeth
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Betsy's laugh precedes her as she joins her husband. The last phone call was from their son Jamie, the third generation of Wyeth artists. "There must be some awful things said about us," she mock-confides to Wyeth. Andrew's mood clears instantly, and he nods toward their inquisitive guest: "She asked me all about our sex life." And what did you say? Betsy wants to know. "Twice weakly," he winks in reply. "Do you know how to spell...
They stand outside in the haze, on the balding knoll where their house rests. The trees list permanently to the north, made arthritic by the wind. Figures in a Wyeth landscape -- except for the yardarm, with flourishing skull and crossbones, that towers wickedly behind the house. In a moment the artist is off on another ramble, toward a new attic or field or relationship or controversy. More than likely, he will wander back to Betsy. She calls Wyeth "you old pirate"; he must know she is the anchor...
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...