Andrew Wyeth's Secret Nudes (Encore)

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Hi, today we have an episode for you that we first ran back in late 2021.

It's one of my favorites.

It's about Andrew Wyeth and a scandal, a painting scandal that took place in the 1980s.

It's a scandal that turned out to be less salacious than it first seemed, but more interpersonally fraught.

There's a great book called Parallel Lives, Five Victorian Marriages, in which the author, Phyllis Rose, looks brilliantly and incisively into the the incredible depth contained in some long-term partnerships.

And without comparing this episode to that book in quality in any way, I would say I was going for something in that spirit.

Enjoy.

Also, please know that this episode contains some strong language.

On the afternoon of August 5th, 1986, Doug McGill was sitting at his desk at the New York Times when his phone rang.

I got a call from the news desk, which was the Uber desk right in the middle of the newsroom, you know, to please come up there.

Doug had started at the Times as a copyboy, but he'd work his way up to Arts Reporter, focusing on the visual arts.

It wasn't that often that there was an urgently breaking art story, but that's exactly what the news desk wanted to talk to him about.

Somebody up there had received a press release from Arts and Antiques magazine about their forthcoming issue.

That press release talked about a cache of 240 paintings by Andrew Wyatt that he had kept secret from everybody, including his wife, of a beautiful model, often naked.

Andrew Wyeth was the most popular and famous painter in America at the time.

Though his critical reputation was complicated, he was a household name on the cover of magazines and tapped to paint presidents.

His work was grounded in the two rural communities in which he lived, and that subject matter had established him as a paragon of Americana, sometimes referred to as America's artist.

And now here he was, nearing 70, apparently with a secret stash of intimate, provocative, nude paintings of this one woman.

Paintings and a woman that he'd hidden from his wife and the public for 15 years.

This was hitting on all kinds of journalistic buttons.

It had secretiveness.

It had art and beauty.

It had sex.

It had big money.

It had artistic celebrity.

It was just punching all these buttons.

And they literally told me, we want to get this on the first edition, page one.

So you've got two hours.

Go to it.

Just a few blocks away in Midtown Manhattan, two other news desks would also make the determination that the Wyeth story was front page material.

Time magazine and Newsweek both decided to put it on their cover for the next week.

With just four days to get the cover story done, Time threw all of its resources at it.

At least four correspondents and stringers, freelancers not on staff, fanned out to report the story.

One of those people was Jeannie McDowell, who's still a working journalist who went on to have a long career at Time, but back then was a very ambitious stringer.

I was so hungry to get hired.

I mean, I would have found Jesus if they had asked me to find Jesus.

Jeannie was tasked with going to Chadsford, Pennsylvania, a Revolutionary War-era town about 30 miles outside of Philadelphia, where Andrew Wyeth and his wife Betsy lived.

Jeannie wasn't going to talk to the Wyeths, though.

They were up in Maine for the summer.

Rather, she was supposed to find out everything she could about the woman in the paintings, a woman about whom almost nothing was known, except that her name was Helga.

As Jeannie hopped on a train to Chadsford, she had a sense of what the story might be.

a sense she wasn't alone in having.

It's what made the Helga images an instant media sensation.

Can I be explicit?

My dream was that Helga and Andrew were fucking their brains out and this was going to be like a great story and Betsy was,

you know, kind of going to be the wife, you know, wronged.

And it was going to be kind of a hot, salacious cover story.

That was nothing what it was like.

This is Decodering.

I'm Willip Haskin.

For a moment, in the late summer of 1986, the story of Andrew Wyeth's Helga paintings took over the news.

But in the days, weeks, months, and years that followed, what at first seemed like an honest goodness, highbrow, lowbrow, late summer scandal started to seem like something less sexy and more calculated.

In this episode, we're going to dive into this 35-year-old media brouhaha, a story about artists and muses, husbands and wives, art and money, privacy and publicity.

It was pounced on as a sex story, then became widely seen as a business one.

But it might actually be something else entirely.

So, today, onto codering.

What was really going on with Andrew Wyeth's Helga paintings?

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Historically speaking, a painter and a model having an affair is a pretty common occurrence.

But Andrew Wyeth occupied an uncommon place in the culture, and that's where I want to begin, because that place goes a very long way towards explaining why this story was jumped on as juicy from the very start.

His work was very much, you know, like LL Bean or, you know, Talbot's Red Door.

Gwendolyn Duboisaw is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania who studied and written about Andrew Wyeth.

His work was so out of fashion that it never went out of fashion.

It was kind of consistently American and so that you know Wyeth had a really strong enduring appeal.

Andrew Wyeth was born in Chadsford, Pennsylvania in 1917.

He was unusually devoted to painting from an extremely young age.

He had his first show in New York City in 1937, when he was just 20.

It sold out.

His paintings, done in watercolor, dry brush watercolor, and the fussy ancient technique of egg tempera, tend to be timeless pastoral scenes and portraits, grounded in Chadsford and the rural area around Cushing, Maine.

His most famous painting by far is 1948's Christina's World.

I bet you can picture it.

It's one of the most recognizable and reproduced images of the 20th century.

In the foreground is what looks like a young woman seen from the back in a lobster pink dress.

Her legs are splayed in a yellowing field.

Her arms hold her torso upright, and there's a farmhouse up a hill in the far distance.

It's modeled in part on Christina Olson, an impoverished, middle-aged woman Wyeth was introduced to by his wife Betsy in Maine, actually on the very first day he and Betsy met.

Christina had a degenerative muscle disease that had left her unable to walk, though she was too proud to use a wheelchair.

One day, Wyas saw her out of a window.

I saw her crawling out to a little

truck garden she had next to the house one day, and it dawned on me, what terrific, I mean,

made a quick notation of this idea of Christine in the field.

the house in the background.

And several days went by and this kept building in my mind.

Though there's nothing in the painting that makes the subject's disability explicit, like so much of Wyeth's work, it's full of yearning and melancholy and contains no hint of the modern world.

In 1949, the Museum of Modern Art bought Christina's World for just $1,800,

which would be about $20,000 today.

At this point, Wyeth was already critically acclaimed and commercially viable, but the acquisition catapulted him to another level of success and fame, one that would last for decades.

Gwendolyn Dubois Shaw again.

People loved it.

His work sold.

He had tons and tons of money, you know, rolling in over those years.

That success never flagged.

He was popular, beloved, not some insular art world figure, but someone known to the American public at large.

At one point, Michael Jackson wanted Wyeth to paint him.

But by the late 1960s, Wyeth's critical reputation had fallen off a cliff.

He was a realist at a time when abstraction had become synonymous with modern art.

He was dismissed as nothing but a glorified illustrator, a regionalist, a ruralist, an American apologist, a Republican with a capital R.

He's described as our greatest living kitchmeister and having a palate of mud and baby poop.

For years, the Museum of Modern Art hung Christina's world, one of its blockbuster paintings by the Escalator.

And this was very much still the state of play in the 80s.

Wyatt's famous, popular, successful beyond measure, but to people in the know, he's the emperor who has no clothes.

Middlebrow, mainstream, old-fashioned, retrograde.

He was a yawn in the 80s.

In 1986, Chris Leone was an art director at the upstart monthly magazine Art and Antiques.

He wasn't quite as corny as Norman Rock,

but it's sort of at the same kind of genre.

You know, I think the art world was just into totally different things at that point.

He was another generation's artist.

But the magazine Chris worked for was about to change all of that.

So before going ahead, I just want to briefly situate the art world in the 1980s.

It's a real turning point, the decade when it starts to look something like the art world as we now know it.

And that's because it's the decade money started flooding in.

It's the Go-Go Reagan era, and Wall Street is flush with cash.

That money, along with foreign funds, particularly from the Japanese, rushes in, driving up prices and turning art into investment properties.

Wise prices alone balloon, quintupling over the course of the decade, which ends with him selling works for a million dollars.

It's a booming, lucrative world, and on the edge of it is the aforementioned monthly publication, Art and Antiques, which, though not a huge magazine, was about to make a huge splash.

In 1986, Art and Antiques tapped a new executive editor, a man in his 30s named Jeffrey Scher.

Jeff, who died in 1995, was up on the contemporary art world scene, which was minting stars like Keith Herring and Jean-Michel Basquiat at the time.

But he was also a collector.

His 100-square-foot shoebox of a New York City apartment was jammed with books and a trove of Sarah Bernhardt ephemera.

This was fitting for the editor of Art and Antiques, which wasn't focused on the art world's cutting edge so much as on its moneyed middle.

It ran stories on how to spot a fake and appraise your work, critical essays on Picasso and Winslow Homer, and interviews with artists like Andrew Wyeth, who, as previously mentioned, was not thought of as being particularly cool.

In September of 1985, the magazine ran a cover story on Wyatt, the first major press piece he'd done in a decade.

Jeff Scher wrote the piece, going to Chad's Ford to interview Andrew and meeting and corresponding with Betsy too.

Art and Antiques also ran plenty of pieces about the other half of its title, Antiques.

And there was a pitch about an antique that brought Jeff Scher to the art director, Chris Leone's office, in April of 1986.

Jeff came into my office and told me that a man who collected carriages, like 19th century carriages, was presenting it as a story idea.

It was a bit of an oddball story, but it seemed worth exploring.

So Jeff, the editor, and Chris, the art director, got into a rental car and drove down to see the carriages, which happened to be in Chadsford.

And we went, we looked at the carriages, we had a lovely lunch.

And then the carriage guy said, well, there's something else we want to show you.

They hopped back into the rental car.

And after a few minutes, Jeffrey thought he knew where they were going.

Jeffrey said to me, oh my god, we're going to the Wyatts.

Remember, he'd written about and met the Wyatts for a piece just the year before.

They arrived at the property and walked inside a building.

There was a magnificent painting that was hanging over their fireplace, a rectangular picture.

I think she was wearing a

black turtleneck sweater.

It was very dark and she was lying down and it was, it it was pretty spectacular then the man who had brought them there told them he wanted to show them something upstairs i was very excited because it's fabulous you know and jeff was almost having shakes a little bit very nervous and smoking like a chimney and we go in and there they are

stacks and stacks and stacks of helga paintings

There were 240 pieces of artwork in the room, a collection now known as the Helga pictures.

Only some of them are finished paintings, four tempuras, 29 watercolors, and 10 dry brush watercolors, another specialty of Wyeth's.

These were hanging and leaning on the walls.

The rest of the collection was sketchbooks, pencil sketches, and watercolor studies stacked in piles nearly chest high.

The paintings are all of Helga, a blonde woman whose features and body subtly change, depending not only on the light and the setting, the emotion and fantasy fantasy Wyeth was trying to capture, but also the age she was when Wyeth painted her, anywhere between 38 and 53.

In one, she's in a dramatic hunter-green Loden coat, walking through the snow.

Another foregrounds her strawberry blonde braided pigtails.

But most often, she's naked, usually sleeping, the night or the daylight washing over her, her breasts full, her pubic hair exactingly tangled.

There's an erotic charge to many of the works.

In Lovers, Helga sits naked on a stool, looking away from the viewer and a window as the light streams across her body, a shadow suggesting someone else's presence.

In another painting called On Her Knees, she's kneeling uncomfortably on a bed, also looking away from the viewer, her arms clasped behind her, seemingly submissively waiting for someone.

As Jeff and Chris were taking all of these images in, the man showing them around said, almost no one has seen these paintings.

Almost no one knows they exist.

And then he made them an offer.

The guy said, well, the Wyeths would like you to do a piece on this and introduce these secret paintings to the world.

The guy locked the door.

We left the place

and we went back to New York.

I knew Jeff's wheels were turning because they turned on the outside of his brain.

And, you know, he knew this was a hot, a hot commodity.

Over the next couple of months, Jeff Scher worked directly with the Wyeth, speaking to Andrew and Betsy both for a story that would run on the cover of the September 1986 issue of Art and Antiques.

But a few weeks before the issue came out, Art and Antiques put out a press release touting it.

And it's that press release, not the article itself, that kicked off the whole hoopla.

Because it's that press release that inspired the New York Times news desk to get Doug McGill working on a front-page story about the paintings.

I was just a tiny bit ashamed that the story had come to me via a press release and not from my gumshoeing, you know.

For the Times article, Doug McGill spoke to Jeffrey Scher, who outlined the story as he knew it.

Sick with the flu and fearing his death, Wyeth had revealed the collection to his wife only in 1985.

Soon thereafter, it had been sold to a collector for many millions of dollars.

The Wyatts had not disclosed any details about Helga beyond her name, but Scher believed she was a married neighbor.

The Wyatts themselves declined to speak with McGill at this point, but the piece ended with a quote from Betsy Wyeth anyway, one she'd given to Jeffrey Scher.

Betsy, what do you think all these paintings of this mystery room are all about?

And there was a pause and she said, love.

It was this remark.

Love in the context of everything else that was most responsible for the widespread assumption that Wyeth and Helga must have had some kind of affair.

Chris Leone of Art and Antiques again.

America's favorite painter paints these provocative and some not provocative pictures.

And Betsy says it was love.

It was like a stage soap opera.

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So Betsy Wyeth is not some sideline figure in this story or in any story about Andrew Wyeth.

The two met in Maine when she was just 17 and Wyeth was 22.

They were married in 1940 and remained so for nearly 70 years.

And she was a force from the start.

In 1943, Wyeth was offered a lucrative contract to paint 10 cover images for the Saturday Evening Post.

Betsy reportedly told him while he was considering it, you will be nothing but Norman Rockwell for the rest of your life.

If you do it, I'm going to walk out of this house.

Wyeth didn't do it.

And moreover, he would go on to credit her for being absolutely right.

If you hang around in the art world long enough and you meet enough people, you recognize the character called the great artist's wife.

This is a type, and Betsy was that.

The New York Times Doug McGill again.

The husband gets all the glory.

The husband is a genius.

But the great artist's wife also often has the quality of running the show.

and making sure that all the business things happen the way they should and protecting the husband and paying the bills and just creating a safety zone around that person so that person can dive into the art as as deeply and for as long as as he wants.

Betsy was her husband's muse, his collaborator, curator, editor, protector, and business manager, which she was widely known to be very good at.

She titled all of his paintings, signed the checks, managed the merchandising, oversaw the reproductions, and maintained his catalog, taking meticulous notes on each piece in her little black notebook.

She adored her husband's work.

Here she is speaking about it in a 1980 documentary short by King Vidor.

My husband's a master of metaphor.

Just possibly this is a unique American achievement.

But she was also her husband's toughest, firmest critic.

She would tell him what wasn't working and what to take out of certain paintings.

She once described Wyeth as being with his models like a director, like Ingmar Bergman, but she also described herself as a director, his director.

And Wyeth bridled against Betsy's authority even as he appreciated it.

According to Wyeth's biographer, Richard Merriman, in the book Andrew Wyeth, A Secret Life, he was amazed by Betsy's accomplishments on behalf of his work, but he also sometimes felt merchandised.

You finish a tempera tempera and right away she's talking a reproduction, he said.

The pair were very close, very intertwined, very impassioned, but also competitive and disputatious.

We're different.

It's not always peaceful, but nothing good is peaceful.

Remember that.

But we have a great time.

We don't have a dull moment, I can tell you that.

That's Wyeth talking about his marriage in a documentary from 1995, produced by Betsy.

Wyeth and his art were the center of the couple's universe, and Betsy made that universe go round by, among other things, dealing with the outside world.

So now I'm going to pick the narrative back up, just as the outside world is going bananas about the Helga paintings.

So we're back where this episode started.

The New York Times story is out.

Jeff Sherr, the editor of Art and Antiques, is all over the news.

Time and Newsweek have decided it's their upcoming cover story.

Reporters from all over the country descend on Chad's Ford in Maine, where the Wyatts are staying.

It's probably worth noting that it was August, a notoriously sleepy news time.

But even so, helicopters supposedly buzzed around the Wyatts property looking for photos.

Everyone's trying to further the story, to find out more.

And it's in these very early days, the Time magazine correspondent Kathy Booth, now Kathy Booth Thomas, gets assigned to try and speak to the Wyatts up in Maine.

So I called the Wyeth house and a lady answered.

The lady said, well, I'm just the housekeeper.

I'll have them call you back.

And then she hung up.

And about 10 minutes later, I got a phone call and it was Betsy Wyeth.

Same voice.

She had been screaming calls

from the press all morning.

Betsy invited Kathy up to Southern Island, a 22-acre property with a lighthouse where the Wyeths have a home.

Their caretaker takes me out in this boat and it's just this

lighthouse and this kind of bare knoll.

It was like walking into an Andrew Wyeth painting.

And then they opened the door to the house and Betsy greeted me and they were super nice.

Kathy had been expecting tension, but there didn't seem to be any.

Wyeth surprised her too.

He didn't do interviews very often, which had helped him build the reputation as mysterious and above the fray.

But Kathy found him to be kind of a ham, a rogue, impish.

At one point, in front of Betsy too, he joked that he and Betsy had sex twice weekly.

And then he spelled it out, W-E-A-K-L-Y.

Kathy and Wyeth talked for two hours, all about the paintings and his process, while Betsy was in the kitchen.

Wyeth never used Helga's name and he didn't want to speak about her directly, but there was something he wanted to address.

He wanted to clear up the misconception about his wife's quote that it was love.

As she was talking to me on Zoom, Kathy was looking over her notes, a copy of the report she'd sent to the writer at Time back in 1986.

It was on printer paper so old it had those strips you can tear off with the tiny holes on the sides.

The part she's about to read is what Andrew Wyeth said to her when they spoke.

I know it's a dangerous quote and it sounds sentimental.

People are going to think, particularly with this group of paintings, that it's sexual love, but it's a love of warmth, of finding something that's precious and real.

It's like a wonderful animal, a dog that will come up and sit in your lap and you pet its head.

I think my wife's statement is very beautiful and very real, but a lot of people will take it wrong.

Kathy also asked Betsy Wyeth about the quote.

She told Kathy she hadn't meant sexual love, but love of an object.

Later, she would tell Doug McGill at the times, it's like the love for hills, the love for breathing, the love for storms and snows.

But Betsy did tell Kathy about when she'd first heard about the paintings.

She said it was in 1985.

She'd gotten to pick Andy up from the airport.

She said that all she remembered of him telling her

was they hit a bump in the road.

I mean, it sent a chill down my back when she told me that because

it spoke to me.

I mean, how many times in our lives have we had news we might not have welcomed come and you just remember like something physical that happened and you don't even really remember the conversation all that well.

Kathy left the WyFs convinced that there was real hurt there for Betsy, but no physical affair by WyF.

Even as other reporters began turning up information that also made the story seem less splashy than it initially appeared.

For one, the secret cache of paintings.

It wasn't all that secret.

At least three paintings that turned out to be of Helga had been sold by the Wyatts over the years.

One had been used to promote an exhibition, one had toured the world, one had been in an art magazine in 1979, one had been in art and antiques in the 1985 story.

A few were on display at the Brandywine River Museum of Art, which houses much of Wyatt's work.

Wyeth had even given one to Betsy in the early 1980s, the painting she had suggestively titled Lovers.

Meanwhile, the time-stringer Jeannie McDowell, who'd been sent to Chad's Ford to find out more about Helga, was finally making a little headway.

Reporters at other papers had identified the model as Helga Testdorf, a married 53-year-old from Germany.

Her son was standing outside their house now with a family Doberman, and she didn't want to speak with the press.

But then Jeannie heard Helga might work for Andrew Wyatt's sister, Carolyn.

So I went to track down Carolyn.

Someone gave me her number, and I think I called her 50 million times.

By this point, it was Saturday morning, and the editors at time were holding the issue open to the very last minute, hoping for some new information.

Literally, in the last moments of

of the time window, I got a call back from Carolyn who told me that Helga was their cleaning woman and their housekeeper.

How much of a secret could Helga be?

How could Betsy not have recognized her in the handful of paintings she'd seen if Helga had been working for a member of the Wyatt family for years?

On Monday, August 11th, both Time and Newsweek appeared with Helga paintings on their covers, a rare double whammy usually reserved for presidents and geopolitical crises.

Newsweek went with the headline Andrew Wyeth's Secret Obsession, while Time went with Andrew Wyeth's Stunning Secret, and what, in my opinion, is a particularly weak painting from the Helga collection.

It's a crop version of the first nude of Helga Wyeth ever painted back in 1972.

Reportedly, when Betsy finally saw it, years later, she said, now that's a bad picture.

It was less than a week since the original story had broken, but the backlash was brewing.

Both pieces were more than a little skeptical of of all the attention coming to the paintings, even as the pieces themselves continued to shower attention on them.

To stick just with Time magazine, the cover story, written by the magazine's movie critic, Richard Corless, asked, could it be that Betsy's public hint of the affair was part of an elaborate strategy to woo media attention and thus inflate both the price of the works and the value of Wyeth's middlebrow eminence?

It goes on to quote an anonymous employee at the Brandy Wine River Museum of Art as calling the whole thing the best stunt I've ever seen.

I think it just became clear pretty quickly that it wasn't as sexy as we all hoped it would be.

That it was,

you know, Helga was, she was secret and Wyeth had kept her secret and private.

In fact, I honestly feel that it quickly became apparent that it was

not completely, but largely a way to generate publicity for this trove of paintings that had never been seen.

A week after the two cover stories came out, Michael Kinsley, writing in the Washington Post, described the whole thing as the Helga hype, attributing it all to the Impresarios Betsy Wyeth and Jeffrey Scher, saying would-be news managers in Washington should sit at their feet.

But there's a key figure missing from this assessment, a person as responsible as anyone for everything that had happened to this point, and the one who in the months to come would make the whole thing seem even more calculated.

The guy who actually owned the paintings.

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The man who bought the Helga collection was a businessman, born and raised in Texas, named Leonard E.B.

Andrews.

Andrews died in 2009, but made his first fortune at an early credit card company.

In the 1960s, he started a newspaper that ran during the New York City newspaper strike.

And in the 70s, he started a series of micro-targeted print newsletters.

These niche trade papers grew his fortune and included titles like the asbestos litigation reporter and the swine flu claim.

Probably my favorite detail about Andrews, though, is that for nine years, he had a column in the New York Daily News called Ponder This, for which he wrote semi-poems like, What message do you get when you contemplate a lovely little flower?

I hear a very quiet message.

Be like me, make beauty a part of your life.

Andrews was an art world outsider, but he had purchased six Wyeth paintings.

He didn't know the Wyeth very well, but when they decided to sell the Helga collection, ideally hoping to keep it all together, they invited him to Chadsford to take a look.

He spent two hours alone with the treasure trove of pictures and decided he wanted them all.

This was in March of 1986, months before the paintings were announced to the public.

Andrews negotiated with Andrew Wyeth, who unusually sold Andrews the copyright to all of the works, the rights to reproduce the images.

Andrews paid something around $6 million and assured Wyeth he'd try to keep the collection together.

Leonard made sure that that collection was very, very, very visible.

Peter Ralston grew up in Chadsford, right next to the Wyatts, who he describes as second parents.

He photographed Wyatt's work and he was there the day that Andrews brought the checkover for the paintings in early April of 1986.

Leonard was going on and on about how how this was a national treasure, and he was going to defend the integrity and the unity

of this collection to his dying day.

It was a national treasure.

We must have heard national treasure half a dozen times.

And Andy and I, every time he said it, Andy and I, if we could, we'd look at each other and kind of like there was a really subtle little rolling of the eyes because we weren't really sure how

that was going to play out.

Very swiftly, Andrews lined up a number of high-profile showcases for the collection.

Three, to be precise.

First, even before the sale went through, he was connected with a respected art book publisher who was eager to print a catalog of the Helga images.

Second, that publisher reached out to a number of museums, with the National Gallery in Washington, D.C.

deciding to stage an exhibition that would then tour other museums around the country.

And then there was the third showcase, the art and antiques piece that kicked everything off.

That piece came about the same day that Leonards brought over the check, and Peter and Wyeth were there, rolling their eyes at each other.

They were toasting the purchase with champagne and chatting about the collection.

We all talked, and Weather said there's going to be a book.

You know, I think I said, you know, if there's going to be a book, you know, you're going to want to release this, you know, maybe launch the story with a magazine piece.

You know, we were talking about what magazines might be best.

So I said,

well, you know what?

This is pure coincidence, but people from Art and Antiques magazine are coming down from Manhattan, I swear to God, tomorrow morning.

Peter had done some work with Art and Antiques before, and he recently, in good faith, had pitched a story about 19th century carriages.

Peter was the carriage guy.

Wyeth, for his part, knew Art and antiques.

He'd done that piece with them just the year before, and he liked how it turned out.

So the next day, Peter, with Andrew Wyeth and Leonard Andrews' blessing, took Jeffrey Scher and Chris Leone to the Wyeth estate, showed them the helgas, and offered them the story.

One thing I want to note here is that Betsy Wyeth was not there when Andrews and Wyeth and Peter Ralston came up with this plan.

Betsy wanted no part of all this.

She was, you know, she was hurt.

It was very tumultuous at home over all this.

This was a big, big, deep thing.

In fact, Betsy never much liked Leonard Andrews.

She was suspicious of him and didn't think they should sell the copyright.

But Andrew Wyeth was always ultimately the person who decided who his painting sold to.

And he liked that Andrews was a decisive outsider who seemed to love the work, which Wyeth was eager to get out there.

He was hoping to shock people a bit, shake them up, push them to stop thinking of him as some fuddy

as America's straight-laced artist.

And at first, it worked.

When the Art and Antiques press release came out with all these other showcases already in place, it kicked off the whole media hoopla I've been chronicling.

By May of 1987, when the catalog and museum show arrived, the skepticism that had started bubbling up almost instantly had bubbled over.

The paintings came accompanied with much fanfare.

The book was the first art book to be selected for the Book of the Month Club.

Charlton Heston narrated a video about the paintings that you could buy at the museum shop, but the reviews were bruising.

A referendum on the whole frenzy.

The critics went to town on what they considered to be an orgy of marketing.

Neil Harris is a professor emeritus at the University of Chicago and the author of, among other books, one about the longtime director of the National Gallery.

They saw this

as a

sort of medley of overstatements, sometimes occasional lies,

all of the interest of, again, selling, selling books, selling tickets to the exhibition, selling the reputation of the artist, and so on.

Remember, this was the 1980s when art and commerce and marketing were cozying up to each other in earnest.

A PR play this successful and brazen still seemed unseemly, gauche.

And then it got worse.

In August of 1989, just as the Helga exhibition was finishing up its final stop at the Brooklyn Museum, Leonard Andrews announced that he wanted to sell the whole thing.

I just want to divest myself of it, he told the Washington Post.

Critics think the whole Helga thing was orchestrated.

They think I'm making a bundle on it.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

But by November, Andrews had sold the whole collection to an undisclosed Japanese buyer for somewhere between $50 and $60 million,

a tenfold profit.

Fine art museums are fairly strict about not exhibiting work that's for sale.

Andrews had initially told them and the press he had planned for the collection to be the cornerstone of his nonprofit foundation.

Now it seemed it had all been part of a scheme to jack up the worth of the paintings.

One of the museum directors who had put on the Helga show said simply, we were used.

It iced the whole thing as a crass marketing exploit, in the words of the art critic Robert Hughes, the greatest and perhaps defining art world hype of the 1980s.

In the years since, this has been the prevailing narrative about the incident.

It was choreographed, staged, puffed up, but not just by Andrews.

Though the YS did not explicitly profit from any of this, remember, the paintings were sold before they were announced to the public, and they did not have the copyrights.

The sense was that none of this could have happened without their participation and assistance, especially Betsy's.

She may not have liked Leonard Andrews, and she may not have dreamed up the rollout, and she may not even have invited Jeffrey Scher to do a story, but she did speak to him, and she was the shrewd, canny, on top-of-it business manager.

Moreover, she was the the one who had propelled the whole story into the stratosphere, finessed the whole thing onto the front page with that one word.

Love.

If that wasn't a commercial calculation, what could it possibly be?

Why'd she say that?

So, to give you a provisional answer to this question, I want to explain what was going on before the paintings were shared with Betsy in 1985.

Wyeth started painting Helga in the early 1970s, and for years he told no one.

He wanted to paint something just for himself, and so he did.

By the end of that decade, his secrecy was slipping a bit.

He came to me and asked me if I would

put them away,

if I could be

involved in hiding them, so to speak.

Jim Duff was a director of the Brandy Wine River Museum of Art for almost four decades.

And back in 1978, Wyeth asked Duff to take the Helga paintings out of his studio and secure them safely at the Brandywine.

What's the secret?

Yeah, I needed to keep my lip button.

Jim wasn't the only person at the Brandywine to know about the paintings, and in the years that followed, an increasingly large inner circle learned about them, but not Betsy.

This became increasingly difficult for Wyeth, though, because among other things, Betsy was his most essential critic.

He needed her feedback.

So he started showing her some of the paintings by passing them off as one-offs, not part of a series.

He told Betsy in each case that this was a blonde woman here or a blonde woman there that he'd found as a model.

And there was nothing unusual about that.

When Duff says there's nothing unusual about that, he means that Wyeth was very secretive about his work.

Even with Betsy, he didn't talk about what he was painting and he didn't show works or series in progress.

But the length of time he kept Helga private was was unusual, and the subterfuge he deployed to keep the painting secret could be unusual too.

In 1976, Wyeth camouflaged a drawing of Helga lying in bed, naked from the back, by changing her hair and skin tone, by making her black.

As much as Andrew Wyeth hid what he was doing from Betsy, it also seems like Betsy tried not to know.

Those two people were joined at the hip, Andy and Betsy.

They loved each other, needed each other, couldn't do without each other.

But Andy couldn't have painted if Betsy didn't, and he said this over and over, if Betsy didn't give him the space.

And Betsy gave him the space.

But that wasn't always easy or simple.

One of the precipitating incidents to the Helga series had to do with another one of Wyatt's muses and models, Siri Erickson, who he began painting soon after Christina Olson died.

Siri was 14 when Wyatt started painting her, sometimes nude, with her parents' permission in 1968.

On the one hand, Betsy pushed him further with these paintings.

She poo-pooed an early image in which a topless Siri still has a washcloth over her lap, but then was shocked when he went ahead and took her advice and painted Siri fully naked.

According to Wyatt's biography, a few years later, in 1972, Betsy hired Siri as a live-in maid.

When she found Siri posing for Wyatt naked while he rubbed her back, she lost her temper.

Siri fled back to the house.

Andrew berated Betsy for interrupting his work the whole way home.

Once there, Betsy asked Siri if she and Wyeth were having sex.

They were not.

She told Wyeth he had to be done with Siri anyway.

Soon after, Siri stopped sitting for Wyeth and he started painting Helga, nude.

This time, he kept it from Betsy.

No one knows for certain if Wyeth and Helga's relationship was physical.

It seems not to have been.

A typical quote from Wyeth on the subject is, people say, well, you're having sex.

Like hell, I was.

I was painting, and it took all my energy to paint.

But in a 2018 documentary, Helga said, there are many ways of making love, you know.

And one takes her point.

When Wyeth finally showed Betsy the paintings in 1985, worried she would find out about them after he was dead and be furious.

It hurt.

She was not sure their marriage would survive.

Even if the relationship wasn't physical, it was intimate and Betsy was on the outside of it and Wyeth had kept her on the outside of it, not just as his wife, but as his collaborator, his curator.

It was a double betrayal.

And when Betsy, a proper New Englander who didn't believe in wallowing, who hated for people to feel bad for her, who was a tough cookie, finally saw these paintings.

She got to work.

She started titling them, cataloging them, trying to figure out how they fit in with all the other work from this 15-year period.

By the time she spoke to a reporter like Doug McGill from the New York Times, she seemed calm, accepting.

Betsy, she was all ready for the interview.

She was cool, calm, and collected, and had obviously reached a point of equanimity within herself about this whole thing.

She was settled and clear in a very articulate, even transcendently poetic way.

You know, this is what happens in the art world.

It's all mixed up together.

It's poetically transcendent and it's commercial at the same time.

And you could say the same thing about the love quote.

It was provocative and commercially effective, but it also recasts Betsy not as the clueless wife kept in the dark for a decade and a half, but as the knowing one, the one in control.

And it worked, not only in getting the painting's attention, but in bringing the backlash for something Andrew Wyeth had done more on his own than just about anything else in his 69-year marriage to Betsy, the great artist's wife, who to the end promoted and then protected her artist.

Maybe in retrospect, the story wasn't the tabloid sex scandal the press was primed for or the bloodlessly well-executed business stunt it came to be perceived as, but an intricate and tangled tale about a long and complicated marriage and the people in it and right outside of it, bound together by art and commerce and decades of devotion.

There are a lot of paintings in this story, but what it really reminds me of is a good novel.

The story of the Wyas and Helga didn't even end after the whole thing was largely written off as a PR stunt.

In the years that followed, more and more became known about Helga.

A German immigrant and mother of four, she'd been the nurse for one of Wyas' other major subjects, Carl Kerner, when Wyas started painting her.

She was an uncommonly devoted and accommodating model, willing to pose in uncomfortable positions for hours on end.

And she worked herself to the bone, modeling for Wyas secretly, all while tending to her children and his sister Carolyn.

She really had been her housekeeper and nurse.

Here's Helga talking about the experience in a 2013 documentary.

He needed to be painting for himself.

And he knew that the paintings he had done with you.

He didn't have to show them to anybody.

He could learn,

he needed to feed himself.

Not always have some critic tell him, oh, this is good, this is not good.

Back in the 1980s, Helga was blindsided by the announcement of the paintings.

Wyatt had promised her they wouldn't be made public until his death, and she was gutted and distraught to be so out of the loop.

But by 1991, she had become Wyatt's assistant, caretaker, nurse, and she would remain so until his death in 2009.

After everything that had gone on between the Wyatts and Helga, They all stayed in each other's lives.

It remained complicated.

Helga got a house up in Maine, too.

Wyatt said it was like, I've got two wives.

And Betsy, hurt as she was, could still spin the situation as one in which she had the control.

Betsy loved to play with the situation.

And she said, oh, I feed him breakfast and then I send him off to Helga.

That's Joyce Stoner, Wyatt's painting conservator.

She started working with him about a decade after all of this happened, but she knew the Wyatts well, and Helga too.

If Betsy could be playful about the arrangement, she wasn't always.

Joyce says Betsy once didn't speak to her for six months after she saw Joyce's car parked outside of Helga's house.

She also said that though Helga worked tirelessly for Andy, Betsy paid the bills and no one wanted to ask her directly for the money.

So they'd pay Helga in sketches that would then emerge onto the market.

And Betsy, as Wyatt's curator, would have to date them, label them, deal with them.

It would like being stabs all over again.

So it was a continuing horror from the 80s straight on.

Betsy died in 2019.

Joyce said towards the end, she didn't remember who Helga was, and that was probably for the best.

People who knew Andrew Wyeth and who admire his work, and there are way more of them than there used to be, tend to say that the moral of the Helga story is the paintings.

Peter Ralston.

In the end, it's only.

And I'm lumping up again.

I'm so sad,

but it's all about

those paintings.

There it is.

I can understand what he means.

There's something powerful about the attention that Wyeth paid to this one person and her body and its changes over 15 years.

An act of great intimacy, but also of great observation.

But give or take a few of the best ones, I can't say I'm wild about the Helga paintings myself.

In fact, the comment about them that resonated with me most came from Joyce Stoner, Wyatt's conservator.

I don't want to antagonize my colleagues, but in my opinion, they are not as strong as his other paintings.

He would talk about too that he needed a hard wall to kind of work against, and it's missing in the Helga painting.

So the Helga paintings, oddly enough, are missing the Betsy input.

Thinking about them this way, I like them more.

They really are paintings about love, not only because of what's inside the frame, but because of everything outside of it too, shaping what we see.

This is Decodering.

I'm Willa Paskin.

If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, you can email us at decodering at slate.com.

This episode was written by me and produced by Benjamin Frisch.

It was edited by Benjamin Frisch and Gabriel Roth.

We had research assistance from Cleo Levin.

Decodering is produced by me, Evan Chung, Katie Shepard, and Max Friedman.

Derek John is executive producer.

Merit Jacob is senior technical director.

A very special thank you to Paula Share.

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