Word: wyeth
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Reading the obituaries of painter Andrew Wyeth after his death last Friday, I had a crisis of confidence...
...Meanwhile, in his life, Wyeth was not quite the simple yeoman of Chadds Ford. The people he painted might look as though they got around in oxcarts, but by the 1970s Wyeth was driving an ultraluxe black Stutz Bearcat limo, a car he had in common with Elvis and Frank Sinatra. He was good at giving self-aggrandizing interviews and had a gift for self-promotion that came to a head with the curious case of the Helga pictures. Those were a cache of 240 paintings, watercolors and drawings, some of them nudes, that Wyeth had made between...
...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...
...Reporter" was one of them.) He was also a greeting-card manufacturer who had secured all reproduction rights to the Helga pictures. After the publicity storm had been whipped to a peak, he sold the whole bunch to a Japanese buyer for a reported $45 million. At that point, Wyeth found it prudent to come forward to say there had never been a sexual relationship between him and his model, and his wife announced that actually she had seen some of the pictures before, though not most of them...
...Wyeth won't be remembered for the dubious moment of Helga. It's all those other quiet, elusive canvases that will stay with us. The canons of art history have loosened quite a bit in recent decades, enough so that no full picture of the modern world can exclude what he did. Who knows? Someday MoMA may even bring Christina all the way in from the cold...