Andrew Wyeth's Helga: A Compulsive Fetish or his Best Work?

    Probably somewhere in between is the best answer. For all who are not familiar with Wyeth and his Helga Series, I shall endeavor to explain it simply as 240 pieces of work (mostly water color studies, some spontaneous sketch studies in monochromatic mediums and a smaller number of finished egg tempera canvases) of one woman, Helga Testorf, that were made between 1971 and 1985.

    Andrew Wyeth had met Helga when she was 32, when she helped as a caregiver for another one of Wyeth's favorite subjects, Karl Kuerner, who was the subject of one Wyeth's best works, Karl (portrait of Karl Kuerner). Helga, like her employer Karl Kuerner, was of German descent. Helga immigrated to the United States and Chadds Ford, Pa. in 1961, eventually became a mother and homemaker before becoming Karl's caregiver. Due to her association with Mr. Wyeth, she eventually developed an keen interest in poetry and art. Before Andrew Wyeth's death, Helga was one of the ailing artist's primary caregivers.

    Why Andrew Wyeth became infatuated with this Pennsylvania frolein is unclear, other that he obviously found her a fascinating subject. Some hypothesized that it was her reddish blonde hair that set the tone for this series of renderings by the enigmatic artist, that drew Wyeth to concentrate so much time and efforts on the interpretation of this woman's visage and the ego within. Her chiseled features, her supple form, her pensive stare and ultimately, Helga's innate devotion to the process could have given the great artist the insatiable purpose to slavishly devote so much of his creative energies to one subject.

    One could hypothesized that Andrew Wyeth saw the rich warm tones in the soft colors of Helga's face, that led him to use her, nearly exclusively as his model, in those 14 years that he studied her to the point of infatuation, leaving him his only perogative - to project her essense on canvas for posterity. The lines of her face, the rustic warm tones of her rounded cheeks leaves me with the thought that the great painter could just as lovingly painted a forgetten farm field blowing waving in the soft breeze of a cold winters day as his beloved Helga. Wyeth's attention to her every detail is essentially no different to any other subject: human or inanimate. He was always consistent in his loving portrayal of their essence, in which he took great care as if they were his children. It is my position that Helga was no different for Andrew Wyeth. She was simply his muse.

    Some folks; however, luridly speculated that Helga's allure to Wyeth engendered a passionate affair between she and the doting artist. For those who considered an affair was afoot, Andrew Wyeth's wife Betsy did not disappoint.

    Betsy, his wife of many decades and business manager, it is said, let rumor run unabated until she sold the entire series to Leonard E. B. Andrews in 1986 for, it is estimated, well in excess of over six million dollars. She then denied that the scathing rumor was true, and was convincing to the point of believability. Today the rumor is not the subject, but the work itself.

    Shortly after purchasing the series, Mr. Andrews did allow the National Gallery of Art to organize a national tour of the entire collection that traversed the nation to show at some of the more prominent galleries between 1987 to 1989. It could well be the last time this collection will ever be seen again in its entirety. I was fortunate in having the opportunity to see the show at that same National Gallery of Art, west wing, in Washington, DC. on The Mall. It was an inspiring show in its enormity, and its rich earthy tones were so reminiscent of the great painter's best work; however, some of the spark that was inherit in much of his best early work was missing for me. In retospect, the Helga Series, while an outstanding body of work, is an unfair comparison to the spectacular work produced by Wyeth during the 1940's, 1950's, and 1960's. Moreover, for me, I grew tired of the sameness of subject and I longed for the weathered boats and buildings, the fields of tall brown winter grasses, and the subjects that were just part of the bleakness that was possessed in each of his canvasses from his most inspired and productive period.

    Since that last hurrah, Mr. Andrews has broken up the collection, with much of the series purchased for a large sum of money by an anonymous Japanese collector. Fortunately today, there are many of these works from the original collection being shown in museums and art houses around the world. Although the Helga collection will probably never again be assembled in its former state of togetherness, we will always have the many fractured pieces of the Helga series as a representation of a time in Andrew Wyeth's life when he obviously needed inspiration to create. And if it took his infatuation with Karl's caregiver, Helga Testorf, to be that inspiration so be it. The world will always be a better one because of the creativity of Andrew Wyeth., and the Helga series will be yet another chapter in his well spun tale in the Andrew Wyeth legacy.



    I leave you with two of Andrew Wyeth's more intimate portraits of his favorite subject: Above and below.