‘Helga’ Plus Hype Equals a Full Museum

For the County Museum of Art, it’s been one crowd after another.

While David Hockney’s retrospective, which ended Sunday, was the museum’s best-ever-attended exhibit of a contemporary artist, tickets for the first three weekends of “Andrew Wyeth: The Helga Pictures,” which opened Thursday, are nearly sold out.

It’s not surprising. Wyeth’s “Helga” portraits have been the focus of a nationwide media blitz that made front pages and primetime news casts with a tale about one of America’s most popular living painters, his big secret, sex and lots of money.

While many first-day “Helga” visitors said that only a general admiration for Wyeth’s work brought them out, others said they were lured by the media’s message.

“All the hoopla brought me here,” said Adrienne Rimmel of Sherman Oaks. Pondering the haunting, somber-colored selections of Helga walking in winter, Helga naked in bed, and Helga wearing a crown of flowers, she said, “I just had to see it for myself.”

“The whole ‘Helga’ story was very intriguing,” said Steve Steele, visiting from Seattle. “That’s definitely one reason why I came.”

Since March 29, about 15,500 tickets, ranging from $4.50 for adults to $2 for children, have been sold for the exhibit, here through July 10, said museum spokeswoman Pam Jenkinson. Also, more than 52,000 tickets have been given to museum members who requested them.

The museum has not kept records of advance sales for other ticketed LACMA exhibits, Jenkinson said. (Tickets are sold only for shows expected to draw big crowds.) But early sales and near record acceptance of preview party invitations show “a great deal of interest” in the exhibit, she said, adding that all the advance publicity “certainly” helped.

Headlines about “Helga” first appeared in the summer of 1986, when Wyeth, painter of the iconic “Christina’s World,” unveiled a “secret” cache of 240 works made between 1970 and 1985. Every piece depicted his handsome Chadds Ford, Pa., neighbor, Helga Testorf.

“Helga” made the cover of Time and Newsweek. Reportedly no one, not even Wyeth’s wife, knew about the artworks, many of them nudes, and there was implication by some writers of an affair between the artist, now 71, and his younger model. The paintings were sold to a businessman for several million dollars and a book of the paintings was published by Harry N. Abrams, Inc.

An art world debate over Wyeth’s works added to the din. Was he a mere “illustrator,” as one detractor said, or one of the century’s greatest realist painters?

It was later reported that some of the “Helga” portraits had previously been exhibited and sold. Some critics wondered if the whole thing hadn’t been hype. But the widespread stories made an impact.

“We had people who don’t normally like Wyeth come to see the exhibit,” said a spokeswoman at Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts, which presented the traveling show before it arrived in Los Angeles.

Other first-day “Helga” visitors said the massive media exposure, not just an appreciation for Wyeth’s work, lured them to see the 84 drawings and watercolors on view.

It was “the mystique of the whole thing” that brought Stanley Schwartz, an attorney visiting from Denver. “I’m not particularly enthralled with Wyeth,” he said.

However, many said they came just because they like Wyeth.

Pasadena housewife Kay Rosser came for “the art,” not because of “media hype,” she said. “I have goose pimples” observing the artworks, “knowing how difficult it is to paint in watercolor and to capture all these different moods.”

“I would have come if it was just trees,” said Don Hanson, a painter from Tujunga. “Wyeth has been a favorite of mine for years.”

Tickets for “Andrew Wyeth: The Helga Pictures,” organized by Washington’s National Gallery of Art, are available at the museum and through Teletron and Ticketron. Jenkinson advises that weekend tickets be purchased in advance.

The exhibition, which opened last May at the National Gallery of Art and has also been shown at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, will travel next to the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and the Detroit Institute of Arts, concluding next January.