Before Wyeth's 'Helga' portraits scatter, NYC gallery displays 70
NEW YORK -- Andrew Wyeth 's beguiling portraits of Helga , among the most erotic in American art, are on view at a New York gallery in what could be their last appearance as a wide collection.
Seventy sketches, drawings, watercolors, drybrushes, and a tempera , many in the nude, are being shown by Warren Adelson , who recently sold more than 200 Helga works to private collectors nationwide.
"Andrew Wyeth's Helga: Works on Paper," opens tomorrow and runs through Dec. 22 at Adelson Galleries in Manhattan before the works are dispersed to the new owners, making it unlikely that such a show could be reprised, the organizers said.
Adelson wouldn't disclose names of buyers or the full amount from the sales. He said drawings brought prices in the "low six figures," watercolors in the "six figures" and finished portraits in dry brush and tempera "in the seven figures."
The sales were handled privately after the collection came back on the American market last year. "I contacted people who were interested. That's what art dealers do," Adelson said, adding that some of the works are earmarked as donations to museums.
The previous owner, a Japanese industrialist whose name wasn't revealed, paid "40 to 50 million dollars" for the collection in 1990, Adelson said.
Leonard Andrews , an American collector, initially purchased the works from Wyeth in 1986 for a multimillion-dollar amount, though "far less" than the sales price four years later, Adelson said.
The secret cache of Helga portraits became a sensation when they came to light 20 years ago. Much of the interest focused on speculation about Wyeth's relationship with his German-born model.
Time magazine hailed "the hidden treasure of a major artist -- the most hallowed member of America's reigning dynasty." But the model's husband was said to have been shocked to find her image on the cover. Wyeth's wife, Betsy, also had been kept in the dark about the nude portraits done over a 15-year period.
In 1971, Helga Testorf , 32 , began posing for Wyeth, 54, in his studio at a neighbor's farmhouse and in the countryside around Chadds Ford , Pa. These sessions produced the highly sensual portraits in his haunting, realist style.
Whether Wyeth and Testorf, a married mother, were sexually intimate remains unknown to outsiders. The artist is vague on the exact nature of the relationship.
"When people want to bring sex into these images, OK let 'em. The heart of the Helga series is that I was trying to unlock my emotions in capturing her essence, in getting her humanity down," Wyeth is quoted in the exhibition catalog.
In the interview with art expert Thomas Hoving, Wyeth describes Helga as "the personification of all young Prussian girls. . . . Amazingly blond, fit, compassionate. I was totally fascinated by her."
Selections from the Helga series have been shown at more than a dozen US museums over the last two decades, but the works haven't been seen in Manhattan before now, Adelson said.
Instead of a strict chronological order, the show emphasizes Wyeth's creative process by grouping sketches and drawings from various years separately from the fully realized watercolors and drybrush portraits. Wyeth's agent, Frank Fowler, helped curate the show.
"Crown of Flowers " and "The Prussian ," done in drybrush in 1974, "With Nell ," a watercolor and pencil from 1979, and the drybrush "Refuge " from 1985 are among the highlights. They illustrate Wyeth's masterful draftsmanship and his use of stark natural light and earthy hues.
Born in 1917, the youngest son of renowned book illustrator N.C. Wyeth , Andrew Wyeth was taught art at home by his father and held his first one-man show at age 20 in New York. The watercolors sold out and his career took off. His own son, Jamie Wyeth , is also an acclaimed artist.
Andrew Wyeth's most famous work, "Christina's World " (1948) at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, shows a woman in a field gazing at a weathered farm house. It projects the same sense of loss and longing seen in many of the later Helga portraits.
