It must be stated up front that, whatever one thinks of either Wyeth or the Helga “Suite,” as it is labeled, this is an extremely handsome book. Abrams’ lavish publication of “Andrew Wyeth: The Helga Pictures,” containing an introductory essay by John Wilmerding, deputy director of the National Gallery. Their promotion is completed with Harry N. Done over a span of 15 years, they formed a counterpoint of moody portraits and nudes of a robust blond woman known only as “Helga.” Their sole purchaser, Texas millionaire Leonard Andres, quickly arranged a major traveling exhibition with the National Gallery, and these pictures now appear to have been entered into the official canon of American masterpieces. The paintings were stored at the home of his student, neighbor and good friend, Frolic Weymouth.Last August, Andrew Wyeth dropped a bombshell on the artistic community when he revealed a body of more than 240 previously unknown works.
The sessions were a secret even to their spouses. Wyeth asked Testorf to model for him in 1971, and from then until 1985 he made 45 paintings and 200 drawings of her, many of which depicted her nude. There she raised a family of four children, and acted as caretaker to farmer Karl Kuerner, an elderly neighbor who was a friend and model for Wyeth.
After becoming seriously ill she left the convent and lived in Mannheim, where she studied to be a nurse and a masseuse. In 1957, she met John Testorf, a German-born, naturalized American citizen, whom she married in 1958. By 1961 they were living in Philadelphia, where she worked in a tannery, and they soon moved to Chadds Ford. Helga "Testy" Testorf was a neighbor of Wyeth's in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, and over the course of fifteen years posed for Wyeth indoors and out of doors, nude and clothed, in attitudes that reminded writers of figures painted by Botticelli and Édouard Manet. To John Updike, her body "is what Winslow Homer's maidens would have looked like beneath their calico."īorn in Germany, Helga entered a Prussian Protestant convent chosen by her father in 1955. The Helga Pictures are a series of more than 240 paintings and drawings of German model Helga Testorf created by Andrew Wyeth (1917–2009) between 19. Abrams, Inc., New York" very good condition with unmarked pages dust jacket very good.
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