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.
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.
