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Review: Wyeth's Helga pictures shown at Canton Museum … · Review: Wyeth's Helga pictures shown at Canton Museum of Art in 2004 By Dorothy Shinn ... When I look at an Andrew Wyeth

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Page 1: Review: Wyeth's Helga pictures shown at Canton Museum … · Review: Wyeth's Helga pictures shown at Canton Museum of Art in 2004 By Dorothy Shinn ... When I look at an Andrew Wyeth

Review: Wyeth's Helga pictures shown at Canton Museum of Art in 2004 By Dorothy Shinn Beacon Journal art and architecture critic Aug. 8, 2004.

When I look at an Andrew Wyeth painting, I often have the momentary sensation that I'm looking at a still from an Ingmar Bergman film. Such a comparison should come as no surprise, for in terms of visual language, Wyeth, the famed Chadds Ford, Pa., painter of Christina's World, and Bergman, the Swedish director of such film classics as The Seventh Seal, have much in common, most notably the almost overwhelming sense of isolation and introspection that pervades their work.

Both artists also imbue their work with intense character studies, a feeling of timelessness, watchfulness and foreboding, and much silence.

And they both seem to have a penchant for the human figure set against vast and bleak landscapes; bare rooms lit only by cold winter suns; figures sitting silently, staring into the middle distance; dense woods with leafless trees; small, lost-seeming figures almost absorbed by the darkness and density of huge tree trunks; a crown of flowers adorning a pale-eyed, strong-jawed Nordic head; a blonde figure in heavy, caped overcoat and boots, buffeted by raw winds.

These images are all by Wyeth, but they could as easily have come from Bergman. Bergman's imagery often involves set pieces borrowed from Northern Renaissance paintings, while Wyeth's images contain such a sense of interrupted narrative that they sometimes seem almost cinematic.

Keep Bergman in mind, then, for extra insight, if you're among those lucky enough to see some of Wyeth's most heralded works in Andrew Wyeth: The Helga Pictures, on view today through Sept. 19 the Canton Museum of Art.

This exhibit contains 70 drawings and paintings, among them works that, when unveiled in 1986, caused a furor in the art world and wagging tongues to suggest

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there was more than pigment and paper between the artist and his model (a rumor some said was initiated by Wyeth's wife, Betsy, to spark interest in the work).

Whatever the case, this series is among Wyeth's most intensely realized and examined.

Andrew Wyeth is probably America's most celebrated realist painter. Born in 1917, the fifth child of noted artist and illustrator N.C. Wyeth, Andrew Wyeth came from and sired an artistic family.

Working primarily in watercolor and egg tempera, Wyeth specializes in transforming simple rural settings into dramatic evocations of isolation and longing.

N.C. Wyeth, in a 1945 letter, described the blossoming of his son's talent with remarkable insight: "He is revealing of a spirit of penetrating sadness. . . . Behind Andy's very free badinage and raillery, and almost swaggering carelessness, is a remoteness of spirit that is very moving."

While Andrew Wyeth has painted this "remoteness of spirit" into portraits of presidents and Pennsylvania farmers, family, friends, neighbors, animals and landscapes, the Helga Series may be his finest achievement.

From 1971 until 1985 Wyeth embarked upon a lengthy, discursive study of his neighbor, Helga Testorf.

He created 240 works, a volume characteristic of his approach toward a subject of special interest. These works are intense, insightful and diverse, depicting Helga clothed, nude, in various landscapes and in quiet, solitary interiors.

The series is said to have been done in nearly complete privacy, without another soul realizing its existence, the identity of the model or the extent of the project.

The Canton venue is the middle of three. The show was organized by International Arts & Artists Inc., Washington, D.C., and premiered at the University Art Museum of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. It ends its tour at the Mint Museum of Art in Charlotte, N.C.

In this exhibit we can view the sketches along with the final paintings, which allows us to understand a bit of Wyeth's working process.

We can see how he plans his compositions and how he works them up to perfection. We can catch how he changes his mind and why, not only about the position of Helga in her environment but about her mental state.

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Her expressions are suggestive, not defining. Because of this, because of her stillness, of her intensity and focus and the spare nature of Wyeth's interiors, we find ourselves interpreting, filling in the blanks, adding our own spin to this silent universe.

Wyeth's paintings seem sparse, sometimes almost empty, but ironically, and because they use a strategy familiar to the Modernist movements of Conceptualism and Minimalism, Wyeth's works bring more to those who bring more to him.

He surrounds Helga with great detachments of both space and spirit, so we are impelled to add our own, to imbue her with our own thoughts, our own narrative, to situate her within our own more familiar spaces.

Wyeth's method is exacting, meticulous, even fastidious in the handling of detail, but it is also simultaneously enigmatic: specificity couched in mystery.

The texture of Helga's face, the glints of gold in her hair, the sense that every hair on her head has been painted one at a time is juxtaposed with her solitary placement in a certain space with a certain expression and a certain pose, any one of which could have multiple meanings.

We are given a huge amount of information, and in our assumption that a realist like Wyeth wouldn't give us so much only to withhold the finale, we begin formulating what we think it must be.

We've been conditioned to do this through both art history and the popular press. But maybe it's merely the old silent treatment: the more she doesn't speak, the more we must answer.

Wyeth looks to Northern European painting for his influences -- Albrecht Durer, the van Eycks, the Holbeins -- so we tend to look for other northern content, stylistic and interpretive devices.

Like Durer and the van Eycks, Wyeth is a hair master, layering single lifelike, shimmering strands one upon the other so that they seem to have a physical presence of their own, and using drybrush techniques to achieve eerily realistic skin texture, tone and pigment; either of these abilities were in the Renaissance signs of absolute mastery, even genius.

Donald Kuspit, eminent art historian and art critic, who wrote the insightful essay "The Meaning of Helga" for the exhibit catalog, thus posits Wyeth as a latter-day Northern Renaissance master, not an illustrator like his father.

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This is quite different from the artist who simply observes and paints verbatim what he or she sees. Art is, after all, meant to be interpretive. Without interpretation, it is only replication, which today any camera or copier can do as well, often better.

Wyeth is no replicator, but what Kuspit calls a New Old Master who "rehumanizes the figure that has been dehumanized" by Modernism.

The last Wyeth exhibit to appear at Canton Museum of Art was in 1985, a modest show of watercolor sketches, fortified by a few impressive temperas that hardly hinted at the explosion of works that was just then culminating in Wyeth's studio in Chadds Ford.

Wyeth's "secret" works, The Helga Pictures, were sought after by the most prestigious museums and galleries in the country. And it seemed unlikely that such acclaimed creations would ever find their way to Canton.

But as Canton Museum of Art Director M.J. Albacete put it, "Time, fortune and circumstance eventually moved in our favor, and although we were not among the first to bring this collection to the American public, we must sadly rank ourselves among the last. After the final venue at the Mint Museum of Art in Charlotte, The Helga Pictures will be shipped to a new home in Europe, perhaps never to return."

So take in this show while you can.