ANDREW WYETH’S ‘HELGA’ WORKS HEADED FOR L.A.

The “Helgas” are coming to Los Angeles--and to Washington, Boston, Houston, San Francisco and Detroit.

We knew that, but we hadn’t learned the schedule of the widely heralded exhibition of Andrew Wyeth’s “Helga Pictures” until a Tuesday press conference at the National Gallery in Washington.

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art will host the show of 140 drawings and watercolors next year, from April 28 to July 10, the Washington museum staff announced. The local event follows the exhibition’s inauguration at the National Gallery (May 24 to Sept. 27) and an engagement at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (Oct. 28 to Jan. 3, 1988).

Upon departing the Southland, the show moves on to the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco (Aug. 13 to Oct. 16, 1988) and concludes its tour at the Detroit Institute of Arts (Nov. 13 to Jan. 22, 1989).

The exhibition features Wyeth’s “secret” likenesses of his neighbor, Helga Testorf, which created a stir in the national press when they were revealed last summer.

Wyeth, America’s most popular realist painter, made about 240 drawings and watercolors of Helga over a 15-year period (1971 to 1985). Although they weren’t altogether unknown, a large selection of them has never been previously exhibited as a group.

In the suite of sequential images, Wyeth has drawn his Chadds Ford, Pa., neighbor in about 30 poses. She appears both clothed and nude, in different moods, settings and seasons.

According to a press release, the exhibition is expected to be so popular that the Book-of-the-Month Club has made the illustrated catalogue its “Main Selection” for July.