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Andrew Wyeth: The Helga Pictures
Andrew Wyeth
*Andrew Wyeth: The Helga Pictures* documents one of the great sensations in modern American art: the revelation, in 1986, that Wyeth had spent some fifteen years secretly making more than 240 studies - drawings, watercolors, and temperas - of a single model, his neighbor Helga Testorf, without his wife or the public knowing. This Abrams volume, with text by the art historian John Wilmerding, gathers the images and tells the story. The pictures themselves are quiet and intense: Helga sleeping, standing in winter light, seen with Wyeth's famously exacting, almost austere realism. The secrecy fueled endless speculation about the nature of the relationship, but the work outlasts the gossip. For anyone drawn to Wyeth's tight, luminous world - or to the strange devotion of an artist circling one subject for years - it is a fascinating record.
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The artist
Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009) was among the most popular and most debated American painters of the twentieth century, working in a precise realist style rooted in rural Pennsylvania and coastal Maine. Admired by the public and often dismissed by the avant-garde, he painted a small, intensely observed world.
The book
Published by Abrams in 1987 with an essay by John Wilmerding, the book presents the Helga suite - over two hundred works made in secret between roughly 1971 and 1985 - depicting the same model in interiors and landscapes, and recounts the media storm that followed their disclosure.
How to read it
Look past the tabloid framing to the pictures: a sustained, almost obsessive study of one body and one light over many years. As a document of Wyeth's method, it is unusually revealing.
For more context
Pair it with monographs on Wyeth's Christina's World and his Maine work for the fuller arc of his career.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Andrew Wyeth
- Publisher
- Harry N. Abrams
- Year
- 1987
- ISBN
- None
- Shelf
- Art
- Location
- Colorado