In this article, we are going to review everything you need to know about the interesting art stories regarding Andrew Wyeth and the Helga pictures. Why was the Helga series kept secret? For art, love, or publicity? This series of antique portrait paintings was only revealed by Wyeth after he contracted the flu at age 68 and feared he was dying. It is a rare and serendipitous occurrence in the art world to discover a previously unknown work by a great artist, but discovering an entire series of sketches and paintings in an entire collection - over 240 - all kept hidden away by the artist himself is unheard of. By this time, Wyeth was already a behemoth of 20th-century American painting and American fine art, and the series that would come to be known as The Helga Pictures cemented his legacy as one of the greatest and most enigmatic American artists in history.
The only other person who knew about them was the model - their neighbor, Helga Testorf. They visited his father’s studio and then his own studio where Andy said wanted to show Nancy something - something that she couldn’t tell anyone else about.In the Summer of 1985, while on a drive in their eggplant-colored Stutz Blackhawk, Andrew Wyeth revealed to his wife that he had been working on a series of paintings for the past 15 years without her knowledge. After a meal together, Tom and Betsy settled down to consult on an upcoming show at the Met, and Andy took off with Nancy in his Stutz Bearcat to show her the area. Hoving remembers visiting the Wyeths in Chadds Ford in early 1976 with her husband, Tom Hoving, then director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Helga pictures are often described as having been a secret - even from Wyeth’s wife, Betsy.īut Nancy Hoving remembers them as more of an open secret.Īndrew Wyeth “liked to have secrets,” Hoving recalls, “so he could reveal them.” And the collection created a further stir when it was bought by a Philadelphia businessman for several million and sold three years later to a Japanese buyer for tens of millions. Andrew Wyeth’s “Helga pictures” - a cache of some 240 works, including nudes, of a single model done between 19 - stunned the art world when they were revealed in the mid 1980s, inspiring a show at the National Gallery.
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