Just now, I discovered that Betsy Wyeth died last month, April 21, 2020. Among my lifetime favorites of the Art World is Andrew Wyeth and my favorite of his works were the Helga series from:
"The Helga Pictures are a series of more than 240 paintingsand drawings of German model Helga Testorf (born c. 1933 or c. 1939) created by Andrew Wyeth (1917–2009) between 1971 and 1985"
Obviously, there is more than the beauty of Helga that appeals to me. There is a stillness and solemnity, like watching a wild animal when it doesn't know you are watching.
It is such a deep, complex and subtle story, the Andrew Wyeth Helga paintings. Andrew Wyeth was fascinated (even obsessed) with his German neighbors, the Kuerners, and he became like a local cat who drops by for meals. He walked in and out of their house at will and even set up a studio in an empty room so he could paint there.
It was during that time that Karl Kuerner became ill and Helga, who had trained in Germany to be a nurse and masseuse, came to care for him, that she met Andrew Wyeth and he switched his obsession from Karl Kuerner to Helga. Helga was a e German born immigrant. Her husband met her in Mannheim, Germany, after she left a convent due to poor health. He was an American citizen, though born in Germany, so they married and she came to live in Chadd's Ford.
As far as I can tell, Helga, born in 1933 or 1939, is still alive. She has four adult children. I would love to know a little more about her.
Anyhow, if you don't know the Helga story, what happened was that after Andrew Wyeth became enamored, obsessed, fascinated he drew and painted 240 portraits of her, many of her nude, asleep, in bed. Apparently, from my many years of reading this story, he promised her at the time that no one would ever see the paintings. I can just about imagine the seduction scene that must have taken place to get a married woman to take off her clothes and pose nude.
There is no doubt in my mind that they fell in love. Love emanates from those paintings, Whyeths love and adoration of Helga's beauty, and her trust and vulnerability and serene pleasure in being adored, seen, acknowledged. Many if not most women, married and mothers, become invisible. We are like the servants of the 'big houses' of pre-war England, we quietly make the beds, bathe the children, prepare the food, serve the food, clean up the kitchen, the bath, vacuum, dust and sweep, always kind of behind the scenes, unacknowledged, unnoticed. So there she was, beautiful, intelligent, taken for granted, invisible, until this artist comes along and not only recognizes her beauty and her spirit, but captures it in his adoring portraits of her. What an honor. What a betrayal.
At the point where Wyeth became ill and thought he might die, he told his wife, Betsy, who was his business manager, about the 240 works of art depicting Helga. Betsy, a marketing genius, parlayed the mystery into a several million dollar buy-out by a collector in Pennsylvania. If I remember correctly, there was a part in the contract of sale that insisted the collection be kept together and not broken into pieces and parcels and sold. Hopefully the collector is also a Pennsylvanian patriot, who in time, will bequeath the treasure trove to his state for a museum.
The principal players are all dead now except Helga. Also, hopefully, Wyeth managed to slip a little trust into the estate process to help support Helga's whose inspiration and beauty engendered that handsome fortune for him and his legal wife.
At any rate, one day when I was book shopping in an old bookstore in one of the towns where they still existed - Rancocas "Second Time Around." or maybe the books store in Burlington, I ran across a coffee table book of the paintings of Helga at a very reasonable price, even surprising as it had cost quite a bit when it came out. I think they were telling it for $10. I couldn't believe my good luck. Inside the front cover, someone had torn out the magazine story about the big hoopla over the discovery and sale of the paintings.
If I had to say what it was that so appealed to me about Wyeth's work, I would have to say the spirituality, the loneliness, the awareness of nature, the superb artisan quality of the paintings. They speak to my heart including the Helga paintings which capture that same silent, solitary, still afternoon quality where we become totally aware of something, the trees, the meadow, the room, the state of our souls - which I cannot define but which I can feel.
I think Wyeth managed to convey so much of his love for Helga, not so much the individual woman herself, as something larger that she represents, the ephemeral nature of youth and beauty and love itself. He makes us all fall in love with that moment, that subject, that fiction.
I am going to look for that book now -
Happy Trails,
Jo Ann
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