This Day in Art History (N. C. Wyeth, Painting Patriarch, Dies in Tragic Train Accident)

Oct. 19, 1945—Forty-three years to the day that the creative, adult part of his life began when he stepped off a train in the Brandywine River Valley, painter and illustrator N. C. Wyeth died when a train collided with his car a few miles from his home and studio in Chadds Ford, PA.

A powerful, sometimes overwhelming influence in his family, the 63-year-old Newell Convers Wyeth left his survivors—a wife and five grown children—devastated by the loss of him and the grandson/namesake in the car with him. 

For years, they—and local residents who had grown used to his longtime presence—wondered to what extent the accident represented a culmination of his last few years of mounting melancholy and self-doubt over an inability to be taken seriously as a producer of fine paintings rather than of popular commercial art.

Above all, several questions lingered afterward about the passing of this patriarch with three children and a grandson who followed him into the painting trade:

*Why did he take his grandson out of the car, point to two men husking corn in the morning light, and tell him, within earshot of onlookers: “Newell, you won’t see this again—remember this”?

*Had he been conducting an affair with daughter-in-law Caroline? If so, was a child conceived from that relationship, as local rumor had it?

*When Wyeth came to the railroad tracks, had he been blinded by the morning light, suffered a heart attack—or intentionally committed suicide?

Growing up in the 1960s. I never imagined that the artist behind the Scribner illustrated classics I was devouring (Robert Louis Stevenson, James Fenimore Cooper, and Jules Verne) could have been involved in an incident easily a match for the mystery and drama I was reading. 

Nor could I imagine in the mid-1980s, when I read the breathless accounts of the secret cache of nude “Helga” paintings by son Andrew, that the whiff of scandal had clung not only to him but to his father and even grandmother?

The mystery surrounding Wyeth’s death is ironic, considering that so many other aspects of his life were so extensively documented. Not only is his Chadds Ford studio intact, but he left a trove of correspondence culled by Andrew’s wife Betsy and published as The Wyeths:The Letters of N.C. Wyeth, 1901-1945—a thumping volume of more than 800 pages.

Figuring out what led to the accident is difficult, as the following needs to be weighed:

*Wyeth, when he pointed out the cornhuskers to his grandson, may have been urging him to absorb the physical elements of every experience—something he constantly urged his sons to do—or he may have been voicing his last desperate thoughts;

*Wyeth may well have been having an affair with Caroline, but a pregnancy was less likely, concluded David Michaelis in his 1998 biography of the painter—and, in any case, a child from that liaison would not necessarily have led Wyeth to take his own life;

*Wyeth may well have had a heart attack, since, with more than 300 pounds on his 6-ft., 1-in. frame, he had become badly overweight; but, on the other hand, the additional pounds may also have contributed to a helplessness that preceded suicide.

Moreover, suicide would not have been out of character for a man traumatized by a mother who was overprotective and chronically depressed. When not boosting his artistic inclinations, Hattie Wyeth manipulated him into feelings of guilt, and N.C. adopted the same behavior with his own children—instilling his artistic precepts on the one hand while building more space for his children on his property even after they married so he could control their destinies into adulthood.

So far, what I have written explains why Wyeth’s life was tragic. But we remember him because, despite his fears about its ultimate merit, his work was indeed distinguished.

For starters, the lucrative commissions that Wyeth disparaged (“You’ll grow out of that,” he responded when Betsy told him how much he admired them)—his illustrations for Scribners—enriched the texts on which he worked, adding elements not always readily apparent from the written word. For instance, Robert Louis Stevenson described Jim Hawkins’ departure from home tersely in Treasure Island. But Wyeth’s illustration of the scene depicts Mrs. Hawkins looking away in tears, while Jim walking into the foreground with a blank expression that scarcely conceals his anxiety for the future.

This and other works benefit from a realism so powerful that, for example, Wyeth kept costumes, cutlasses, and flintlocks in his studio for reference and inspiration. The works show up to even better advantage on the walls of the Brandywine River Museum of Art, as the book illustrations are at heart smaller reproductions of larger paintings.

Like his teacher, Norman Pyle, and Norman Rockwell, Wyeth was a master of narrative art whose work, unlike that of so many contemporaries, endures more than a century after their original creation. His versatility extends beyond the printed page, as he also created murals on display in the Federal Reserve Bank, Boston, Hotel Roosevelt and Franklin Savings Bank, both in New York City, as well as magazine advertisements and calendars.

It may take a while, but in time Wyeth may also be remembered for his late-career paintings as well, and not just indirectly, as the father of Andrew and grandfather of Jamie Wyeth.

This Day in Art History (Birth of Andrew Wyeth, Brandywine Painting Prince)

July 12, 1917—Andrew Wyeth, a member of an artistic dynasty who received popular attention for his own distinctive portraits and rural landscapes drawn from the Brandywine River Valley and Maine, was born in Chadds Ford, Penn.

Andrew’s father, N.C. Wyeth, became famous for his vivid illustrations of adventure tales by Stevenson, Defoe, Cooper and Verne. His son, Jamie Wyeth, created more abstract work in his early years, though one venture into the realistic style, a portrait of President John F. Kennedy, gained much notice for him while the artist was still only a teenager, and served notice of the eventual mode he would adopt. Even two of Andrew’s sisters, Henriette and Carolyn, became artists, at a time when that was more unusual than it is now.

For people who don’t follow art closely, Andrew may be best known for reasons associated more with scandal than with achievement. I’m speaking of his “Helga” paintings, a series of renderings (frequently nudes) of neighbor Helga Testorf that were created in secret, with not even Andrew’s wife-business manager Betsy aware of them for a long time. (Or so the story went. See my prior post on the background of this controversy.)

In this and other instances, Andrew’s imagination fed on unconventional sources. One of these, I learned from a visit to his studio, was film. At age eight, he became fascinated by director King Vidor’s The Big Parade (1925), and would go on to see the antiwar silent masterpiece 200 times. He would even consider it his strongest single visual influence.

Helga was not the only neighbor that Wyeth caught on canvass. The paraplegic Christina Olson, who lived on a Maine farm near Wyeth, became the subject of Christina's World (1948, pictured), which shows her crawling in a field below her house. Created with egg tempera and, with the model’s face away from the viewer’s gaze, it is suffused with mystery and has become one of the central holdings of New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

For years, Wyeth was hardly a darling of critics. They regarded his realistic style as unoriginal and out of step with the avant-garde movement; aside from the “Helga” cache of paintings, they saw little of the notorious or transgressive in his work; and those of a bohemian bent regarded Andrew's known votes for Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan appalling.

More recently, however, the critical pendulum has swung toward Wyeth, wrote Daniel Grant in a Huffington Post piece in March. The qualities that the public perceived—meticulous attention to detail, compositional balance, and subdued tones that make the viewer curious about this world—have finally become more apparent to the critical establishment.

Above all, the artist’s intense identification with his subjects can no longer be derided as merely sentimental. “Know it spiritually,” N.C. advised his son on how to approach a subject. “Be a part of it.”

Andrew learned his lesson well.

Flashback, August 1986: Secret Wyeth ‘Helga’ Paintings Cause Sensation

Andrew Wyeth was already a highly regarded painter, part of a multi-generational artistic dynasty, when he became the art world’s answer to Bruce Springsteen by landing on the covers of Time and Newsweek in the same week in August 1986. But this level of fame came less because of his skill than the whiff of scandal associated with a secret cache of paintings unknown to his wife.

In a blogpost from three years ago, I called the Brandywine River Museum of Art, in Chadds Ford, Pa., “perhaps the best regional art museum I’ve come across.” One major reason for this was its association with Wyeth and his family. Andrew’s father, N.C., became famous for vivid illustrations for Robert Louis Stevenson and Jules Verne classics that enthralled me as a child. Son Jamie has made his own mark over the years, including a painting of a thoughtful, grave President Kennedy.

Unlike many of his contemporary painters who created abstract works, Andrew Wyeth seldom left viewers puzzled at what they were seeing. But that didn’t mean he didn’t make them wonder what was behind it. That was particularly the case with his 246 studies, drawings, and paintings of neighbor Helga Testorf.

The 15 years in which Helga posed, the intense amount of time even a single sitting might take (sometimes up to eight hours), and the intimate of the paintings—including a number of full-frontal nudes—would have been enough to make the work notorious. But what sealed the deal was the one-word description of their subject matter by Wyeth’s wife and business manager, Betsy: “Love.”

Betsy, the New York Times reported, did not know of the paintings’ existence until 1985, when Wyeth, fearing he might be dying of influenza, told her about them.

Not everyone accepted the history of the paintings presented by the Wyeths. One dissenter was Robert Hughes, chief art critic of Time. “I expressed skepticism about it,” he recalled two decades later about his conversation with his bosses at Time. “It all seemed a little too good to be quite true, and the romance with the blonde struck me as distinctly unlikely. And since it had long been a well-known fact that Betsy Wyeth was her husband’s business manager, the notion of a quarter of a thousand objects squirreled away from her eyes over one-third of their matrimonial life together seemed even less likely.”

Neither Hughes nor his counterpart as chief art critic at Newsweek wrote their magazines’ cover stories on the find. Consequently, the stories played up the scandal seemingly beneath the surface, with words like “secret” and “obsession” on the covers, rather than putting the work within the context of the artist’s broader career.

I found particularly interesting in this whole curious incident the role played by a secondary character, Leonard Andrews, the initial buyer of the paintings. Andrews owned 25 newsletters. (My favorite title: Swine Flu Claim and Litigation Reporter.) Wyeth, grateful for the Texan’s promise to keep the collection intact, awarded him reproduction rights in return for $6 million.

Wasting no time in drumming up interest in the collection, Andrews sent out press releases and, with scandal whetting publishers’ interest, signed a book deal that became a bonanza when 400,000 copies were sold. A touring exhibition of seven American galleries, including the National Gallery of Art, exposed the collection to a million visitors.

In 1989, Andrews sold the paintings to an unidentified Japanese collector, for somewhere between $40 million and $60 million. Altogether, the Texas publisher was believed to have reaped an estimated three-year profit on this cache of art of more than 600%, according to Los Angeles Times critic Christopher Knight.

Given these circumstances, were Hughes’ suspicions correct about a nonexistent scandal used to hype the paintings and drive up their sales price? In favor of that notion were the following:

*It would have been enormously difficult for Wyeth to hide the paintings’ existence from Betsy because of the amount of time he is supposed to have spent with Helga;

*At least one person not involved with the Wyeth or Testorf families had seen at least one of these works: Nancy Hoving, wife of the head of the Metropolitan Museum of Art at the time;

*The Brandywine River Museum acknowledged that it knew of the paintings’ existence before it was revealed to the world and, in fact, had already displayed some from time to time;

* Wyeth’s sister, Carolyn, dismissed the speculation of an affair between her brother and his subject as “a bunch of crap.”

“What do you do with the girl next door?” novelist John Updike wrote in his review of the Wyeth show. That may be the operative question in this whole hullabaloo. In one sense, it may not have mattered whether or not the Wyeths were complicit in drumming up publicity for these paintings. What did matter was that life changed fundamentally for “the girl next door,” Helga.

In an interview with Monty Python member Michael Palin for the BBC program Michael Palin in Wyeth’s World that was broadcast over a year ago, Helga said Wyeth had promised that the paintings would not be displayed until after his death (which did not occur until 2009, 38 years after she first posed for him). Her answer as to why he broke his pledge was cryptic but suggestive: “I think he was caught in something to let it come out. It was his promise, but Mother Nature had other plans.”

While one rumor had it that a certain chill entered the relationship between Andrew and Betsy after the revelation of the paintings, what was indisputable was that, at least for a time, Helga became collateral damage. Constant press inquiries forced this neighbor to flee from this area of rural Pennsylvania where she had long lived.

It was all part of a larger cycle of paradoxical emotional fragility and nurturing for Helga, a native of Prussia who, as a child, had been imprisoned in Denmark with her family at the end of WWII. She had been educated in a Protestant convent for a few years, married, emigrated to Philadelphia, and, by 1970, was working as a nurse in Chadds Ford for Wyeth’s neighbor Karl Kuerner when she met the painter.

In one sense, Helga was right in telling Palin that sex had “nothing to do with” her relationship with Wyeth. The two met when each was at a crossroads, shadowed by death. Kuerner was terminally ill at the time that Helga was caring for him, while Wyeth had two years before lost Christina Olson, a friend and neighbor afflicted with polio who had been his favorite subject (including in perhaps his most famous painting, Christina’s World).

As a result of the paintings, Helga later said, according to Richard Meryman’s biography Andrew Wyeth: A Secret Life: "I became alive. It shows in the pictures. I became young overnight. I've never done anything more worthwhile." As for Wyeth, the collaboration with this muse gave him a more personal outlet than he may have felt he had in the past few years. Betsy was an extraordinarily shrewd business manager, but she also wanted her husband to continue to generate images in the style people associated him with—to turn out similar paintings “like pancakes,” in Helga’s phrase. In contrast, this intensely focused group of paintings offered at least some degree of creative freedom.

The media crush resulting from the Wyeths’ revelations of the paintings led Helga to flee Chadds Ford for awhile. In time, she returned, even becoming one of his chief caregivers before his death in 2009.