Wyeth’s wife Betsy may have added to rumors of a romantic attachment between painter and muse by saying that the Helga portraits are about love. “She was his model and his muse,” she said. Wyeth, who died in 2009, admired Testorf for her “strong Germanic features,” said Chesnee Klein, curator of the Greenville County Art Museum. The Greenville museum’s substantial Wyeth collection is internationally recognized but this is the first time the institution has organized an exhibition focusing only on some of the Helga pictures.
14 in the exhibition “Andy and Helga: This Whole World” at the Greenville County Museum of Art.
Now, about two dozen of the Helga pictures, as they’re popularly known, are on display through Feb. USA Today featured the story on page one: “Everyone’s Talking About Secret Model.” The secrecy surrounding the portraits and the suggestion of romantic intrigue, which Wyeth denied, created a media sensation that included cover stories in Time and Newsweek. Not even their spouses had known that the neighbor, Helga Testorf, had agreed to model, sometimes nude, for Wyeth. It was one of the biggest art bombshells of the 20th century.Īndrew Wyeth, the celebrated American painter, revealed in 1985 that he had clandestinely created more than 240 paintings and drawings of a neighbor between the years 19.
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