Andrew Wyeth (1917 -). American painter, noted for his interpretations of the people and the austere rural landscapes of Pennsylvania and Maine.

Wyeth was born in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, and was trained by his father, the illustrator and muralist Newell Convers Wyeth. Andrew Wyeth held his first one-man show at the age of 20 and scored an immediate success. His media are chiefly watercolor and tempera; his colors are predominantly subtle shades of brown and gray. In his compositions he displays technical brilliance, realism, and affection for his subjects. Among Wyeth's best-known works are Christina's World (1948, Museum of Modern Art, New York City), Her Room (1963, Farnsworth Museum, Rockland, Me.), and Spring Fed (1967, W. E. Weiss, Jr., Collection). Perhaps the most popular painter of his day, he received the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1963, and in 1970 he became the first living artist to be accorded an exhibition in the White House. In 1986, 240 previously unknown works, all studies of a woman named Helga, were revealed to the public for the first time. Andrew Wyeth's son, James Browning Wyeth, is also an artist.

U.S. watercolourist and worker in tempera noted primarily for painting in a realistic manner the old buildings, the fields and hills, and the people of his private world.

Wyeth's father, N.C. Wyeth, was a well-known illustrator who had studied under Howard Pyle (q.v.) and who served as his son's only teacher. Andrew Wyeth presented his first one-man show in New York City in 1937. The subject matter of Wyeth's pictures comes almost entirely from two localities, the Brandywine Valley around Chadds Ford and the area near his summer home in Cushing, Maine. Wyeth uses a restricted palette mostly of earth colours but capable of hundreds of muted harmonies. His technique is precise and detailed, yet he lifts his paintings above photographic naturalism with an unreal, visionary quality. His best known painting, “Christina's World?(1948; Museum of Modern Art, New York City), exemplifies his mastery of unusual angles of perspective and his use of light to pinpoint time. Other works include “The Trodden Weed?(1951), said to have appealed to the former Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, and “Nicholas?(1955), admired by U.S. Pres. Dwight D. Eisenhower. Wyeth was the first painter to receive the Presidential Freedom Award (1963) conferred by U.S. Pres. John F. Kennedy. In 1977 he became the first American artist since John Singer Sargent to be elected to the French Academie des Beaux-Arts, and in the next year he became an honorary member of the Soviet Academy of the Arts. In 1980 he became the first living American artist to be elected to Britain's Royal Academy. His exhibition at the Whitney Museum in New York City in 1967 established a new attendance record for that institution.

Wyeth's technical resources are remarkable, but more important are his insight into the accretions of living that have left their mark on the people he paints and his ability to convey a sense of generations of living in his paintings of old houses and their interiors.

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The circumstance surrounding the Revelation of Andrew Wyeth's Helga pictures have by now been well recorded. Astonishment and curiosity, in the art world and at large, greeted the news that this major American artist had for fifteen years been working in virtual secrecy on a substantial new series: more than 240works centering around one model, Helga Testorf, a neighbor of the Wyeths in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. Speculation abounded concerning the model, and intense publicity was focused on Leonard E.B. Andrews, the publisher,collector,and philanthropist who purchased the works with the intention of preserving them as national treasures. Amid the tumult, only a few were privileged to view the Helga paintings and drawings themselves; only they experienced and strong,luminous power of Wyeth's work, which shines out like a beacon in this storm of controversy.

 Andrew Wyeth: The Helga Pictures presents to the public for the first and only time every work in the series from a small,closely observed sketch of Helga's eye, through numerous lush studies of Helga asleep, to rich,highly polished dybrushes and temperas. Abundantly clear on page after page is that the Wyeth-Helga

collaboration is unique in American art-and has few parallels elsewhere. For a decade and half, Wyeth chronicled this one woman with passionate intensity and artistry. She appears in all moods and all seasons wrapped in sleepskin, crowned with wildflowers, lying among autumn leaves; She undergoes the physical changes the year make. And,over and over, there are rare glimpses into Wyeth's working methods as finished works emerge from studies marked with flashes of artistic intuition. In more than 100 colorplates and 160 black and whites, Helga takes her place among those few models, like Rembrandt's Saskia and Picassos's Dora Maar, who were transformed by artistic genius into symbols of all women.

Johan Wilmerding, deputy director of the National Gallery of Art in Washington(where the works will be initially exhibited to the public),is the first scholar to have seen the series in its entirety. His text here fully imparts his excitement upon enchuntering these works; he finds parallels for them in the greatest art of the past and sees in them a culmination of Wyeth's long and honored career. Leonard Andrews provides a brief personal account of his crucial role in bringing the series to the public. The book also contains full documentation of the Helga works, including a chronology of Wyeth exhibitions, a selected bilbliography, and comments by the artist himself.

Andrew Wyeth: The Helga Pictures is eagerly awaited at home and abroad. The many Wyeth admirers, who have watched him evolve the great Olson and Kuerner suites, will find new joys to savor here. Scholars will appreciate the book, with its ground-breaking text and painstaking documentation,as an important event in art history. Finally,the book is bound to create new lovers of Wyeth's art, as he reaches out here with work of an extraordinarily compelling artistic and emotional strength.

Welcome to Helgaland

perhaps weakend by seasonal doldrums, the national media recently succumbed to the campaign of sensationalist hype surrounding Wyeth and his latest dour model. - BY PETER SCHJELDAHL

Summertime's normal torpor on the art front got interrupted this year(1986) by a Helgasm. The "discovery" of many Andrew Wyeth portraits of a "mystery woman" called Helgacertain of the story's elements are safely handled only with the tongs of inverted commastriggered media coverage unpreced for any other art topic, ever. Pending an exhibition slated for next may at the National Gallery, Helga is already in King Tut class of instantly ubiquitous icons. The spiraling chain reaction of hype by which a story sufficently hotted up becomes a story in itself which(as in this writing) spawns a fallout of commentary remains at meltdown, a demonstration of publicity power that should humble an art world quick to deplore the occasional mild bosting of a Schnabel, Salle, Clemente or keifer. What we have here is the real thing, full of portent about the real disposition of art in American society.

 The media's view of this dispodition intrigues. Helga has "set the art world aflame," Newsweek averred,referring to an art world few world recognize. Aside from career crowdpleasers like Thomas Hoving and the National Gallery's J. Carter Brown, art professionals including those on media payrolls have been catatonically cool to Helgamania. None of the national publications that ran with the story used its staff art critic for the job. Feature writers pumped the requisite molasses. From Time to the New York Times, the primary voice of authority turned out to be that of Wyeth's business-manager wife betsy, upon whose word that she knew nothing of Helga the whole putative "mystery" rests. Is the work good, Mrs. Wyeth? "Oh God!" she remarked. "The paintings are remarkable. I practically dropped dead because of the quality" Add the crowinf of collector (now Helgarch) Leonard E. B. Andrews, publisher of The Swine Flu Claim & Litigation Reporter e.g., Wyeth id "the incredibly finest artist to come out of America in the 20th century" and you have a splendid chorus of disinterested expertise.

 Expert opinion has never counted for much in Wyeth's reputation, of course, and this argues against a reflex inclination to dismiss the whole affair as a stunt. Though conspicuously manipulated by Betsy Wyeth, and by Art & Antiques executive editor Jeffrey Schaire and publisher Wick Allison whose press release in July, fortuitously timed for journalism's slow season, touched off the explosion the phenomenon could hardly be manufactured from scratch. Public relations wizards hit the craze button daily, and ninety-nine times out of a hundred nothing happends at all. A ready susceptibility, involving wide and deep affection for Wyeth and his work, had to precede the exploitive clatrap. Some clarity about this affection will help us learn the lessons that Helgology has to teach.

What attracts people to Wyeth has to be largely extrinssic to the work, which is formulaic stuff not very effective even as illustrational "realism." Whether or not Wyeth's world is believably contemporary lacking wristwatches and vapor trails, as Henry Geldzahler has noted seems less important than whether it is believably presented on its own terms. Wyeth does have a flair for certain textures, as in getting salt-scented light to lie just so on weathered wood a "sense of place" quite convincing in expanses of a few square inches. Bump it up the scale to rooms and fields, however, and Wyeth's space becomes generalized, flat and unpersuasive. It works only when he can give it a specific narrative function, as in reinforcing the depressiveness of christina's World a tour de force, illustrating an un known story, that towers over the rest of his work as American Gothic does over Grant Wood's.

 Good stories do not occur to Wyeth very often. But obviously they tend to envelop him as an artist. I think his fans get a lot of satisfaction from the simple fact of his existence. seems the operative appeal. In a culture where the mystery of fine art makes people a defensive and solemn, he manages the hard trick of allaying the defensiveness while retaining the solemity (as opposed to, say, Norman Rockwell, who cheerfully dispensed with both). To be at once a mass reassurer and an avatar of the Art myth is not nothing, though it is apt to prove as sterile as anyting hybrid. Byond that, the taste for Wyeth's visually and emotionally starved art suggests a self enjoying puritanical rectitude, the flip side of American consumer gluttony.

 The possibility that a positive denial of meaning and pleasure id what people respond to in Wyeth is raised most strongly by his strange nudes, pictures numb to the poetics and erotics of painted flesh. Time observed that the sensationalism of the Helga tale(artist and model, tee hee) cast "a lurid glow that was not in the paintings," which is a gem of understatement. Judging from reproductions, all the few nudes taken together haven's the sensuality to ignite a firefly. The lack of psychological tension extends to Helga's face, typically stolid and tired (when not sleeping). In general, these pictures appear minor even for Wyeth, being essentially story-less studies.

 To judge Wyeth's work from reproduction is defensible on the grounds that that is precisely where his talent shines brightest. This peculiarity modern type, nostalgic themes notwithstanding he truly is. Brian O'Doherty has termed him a maker of "master images," a phrase perfect for its suggestion of, among other things, handmade prototypes for mechanical mass production. Reproduction doesn't represent  Wyeth's art so much as complete ot, for instance by lending toe sumptuousness of clay-coated paper to surfaces deadly dry in the original. The fact that Leonard Andrews spent millions not only for the Helgas but for their copyright seems to bemuse commentators, but it shouldn's. Ownership of the crabby little pictures is just gravy on the right to their gorgeous dissemination, in which we are going to be awash for what is going to seem like a very long time.

 As for the saga of a classic hype, that will continue, too muttering along until it hits a secind crescendo on the occasion of the Washington show. Its future tack will be intersting now that what Time incautiously called "Andrew Wyeth's Stunning Secret" (Newsewwk weighed in with " Secret Obsession") is developing a distinctive odor. As the Washington Post reported after a little digging, the Helga works never were " hidden," many of them having been sold and reproduced since 1979. Nor is there Testorf, housekeeper for Wyeth's sister Carolyn (who succinctly termed intimations of a Helga-Wyeth romance "a bunch of crap"). Some Wyeth fans may take the evident hoax in stride, perhaps as a hot one pulled by country folk on the city slickers. (That would be the bold way for Andrew and betsy to play it.) But the media tend to feel that it's not nice to fool the media. Will their embarrassment dictate silence or bring a backlash? Will their fling with Helga become Helgagate? Can a culture hero be impeached?

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