Andrew Wyeth: The Helga Pictures. Text by John Wilmerding
"For 15 years, America's most popular living artist worked in secret with neighbor Helga Testorf as model. The resulting 240 pencil sketches, watercolors, drybrush, and temperas, concerned with Helga in all aspects, nude and clothed are here shown in 100 high-quality color plates and 160 black and white illustrations. Works in progress reveal the artist's methods; finished works, an obsession with his model as awesome as his technique. Wilmerding, deputy director of the National Gallery, contributes an informative text, further clarified by the artist's own observations." - Library Journal
"Astonishment and curiosity in the art world and at large greeted the news that a major American artist had for fifteen years been working in virtual secrecy on a substantial new series: more than 240 works centering around one model, Helga Testorf, a neighbor of the Wyeths in Chadds Ford, PA. Speculation abounded concerning the model, and intense publicity was focused on Leonard E.B. Andrews, the publisher, collector, and philanthropist who purchased the works with the intention of preserving them as a national treasure.
Andrew Wyeth: The Helga Pictures presents to the public for the first and only time every work in the series - from a small, closely observed sketch of Helga's eye, through numerous lush studies of Helga asleep, to rich, highly polished drybrushes and tempras. Abundantly clear on page after page is that the Wyeth-Helga collaboration is unique in American art - and has few parallels elsewhere.
For a decade and a half, Wyeth chronicled this woman with passionate intensity and artistry. She appears in all moods and all seasons - wrapped in sheepskin, crowned with wildflowers, lying among autumn leaves; she undergoes the physical changes the years make. And, over and over, there are rare glimpses into Wyeth's working methods as finished works emerge from the studies marked with flashes of artistic intuition.
Helga takes her place among those few models, like Rembrandt's Saskia and Picasso's Dora Maar, who were transformed by artistic genius into symbols of all women.
Scholars will appreciate the book, with its ground-breaking text and painstakingly full documentation, as an important event in art history. Finally, the book is bound to create new lovers of Wyeth's art, as he reaches out here with work of an extraordinarily compelling artistic and emotional strength." - from the dust jacket.
Published by Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Forewords by J. Carter Brown and Leonard E.B. Andrews, 1987 First Edition, Oversized Hardcover with Dust Jacket, 208 Pages, 9 1/2" x 11," Selected Bibliography. ISBN 0-8109-1788-2
Book is in Very Good USED condition: Corners bumped; spine is somewhat cocked; FFEP has a slight crease. Dust jacket is in Good condition: Scuffed; edgewear.
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