Some Not-Larger- Than-Life Helgas

Heeeere’s HELGA!

The much-publicized cache of paintings and drawings by Andrew Wyeth is on view at the County Museum of Art until July 10 and promises to be a popular, if not artistic, success.

Attentive readers do not have to be big art buffs to remember these works. In 1986 they made the covers of Time, Newsweek and various art journals when some 240 were “discovered” in Wyeth’s rural fiefdom at Chadds Ford, Pa., after being sold en bloc to Pennsylvania businessman Leonard Andrews for several million dollars. The story was that Wyeth had--for nearly 15 years--secretly used a neighbor named Helga Testorf as a model, painting her in the moods of all seasons: tramping booted through the snow, leaning dreamily on a spring tree, sleeping in the buff on a summer’s night, innocent as a girl.

Accounts unmistakably wafted the possibility of a love affair between the artist, now 71, and Testorf, a shy, earthily attractive blonde who worked as a housekeeper in the area. Cooler heads tried to prevail, pointing out that paintings of Helga had previously been openly sold and resided in other collections, or that Wyeth’s personal relationship to his model was (a) artistically irrelevant and (b) nobody’s business. Apparently nobody was bothered by the facts. The Helga affair became one of those thoroughly contemporary media-myths and--as they say in Hollywood--grew legs and marched off triumphantly on its own. An Abrams book appeared and an exhibition at the National Gallery drew crowds that placed it among the museum’s Top 10, albeit at the bottom.

Now it is here, trimmed to some 84 items. Nobody needs to feel short-changed about this. I saw the whole caboodle in storage at the Wyeth local stronghold, the Brandywine Museum, and if anything, the editing makes the group aesthetically stronger, thematically clearer. At that, it is still difficult to know what tack to take with the work. It is no longer precisely just a group of pictures that are interesting because they show the working method of a prominent artist or display greater and lesser mastery of technique and the expression of emotion. They have become partly a phenomenological expression of the growing popularity of art, the ability of media to shape that popularity and the willingness of museums with an eye on the turnstile to bend with the wind.

A few years ago a philosophical dealer mused on the anatomy of the art world. “It’s a closed loop,” he said. “It includes artists, dealers, curators, critics and collectors. It’s the only major cultural activity where the public doesn’t have a vote.”

That has changed drastically. The public now votes on the art it wants to see by impressing boards of trustees and corporate sponsors with the numbers in which it attends exhibitions, buys catalogues and responds to the news of multimillion-dollar auction sales. (One can be sure that a lot of otherwise indifferent folks would line up to see a Van Gogh that just fetched $53 million.)

In a democratic society, this sounds like a good thing. Let the marketplace determine the product. If zillions buy Barry Manilow records, that makes him the greatest singer in the world, no matter what a bunch of crotchety so-called experts say, doesn’t it?

Not quite. Museums, for all their complicated roles, are not yet places of pure public entertainment. They are educational institutions with an obligation to enlighten their viewers as well as amuse them or appeal--as a beginning--to the commonest denominators of taste. Appreciation of the best art is not come by easily; the viewer has to participate somewhat strenuously in544499813fic educational tool, but you do get the feeling the guys on the other side of the cameras would prefer you just sit quietly and watch the commercials.

There is nothing wrong with showing the Helga pictures (or loving Calvin and Hobbes, Linda Ronstadt and “The Terminator”) as long as we can keep them sorted out. The museum provides an excellent chance to educate ourselves about Wyeth by coincidentally (or with Jesuitic guile) presenting some 125 Old Master drawings from the renowned British collection at Chatsworth, the ancestral home of the Dukes of Devon in Derbyshire. A stroll through this worthy selection (to June 26) after the brooding blandishments of Wyeth raises instructive questions.

Here is a study of two male nudes by Raphael. The work does an amazing number of things at once, describing anatomy in detail, capturing vigorous movement back and forth, its subjects appearing to exist in an envelope of air and making us feel exactly how much space there is between the toe of the man who kicks forward and the one who reaches back.

Look at the Wyeths again. Virtually none have any swing of movement, save a nude from the back. Often the drawing does not describe the figure fully in the round. At its most extreme it is silly and confusing, as in “Farm Road” where a dark hill in the background looks like a wall that Helga has walked into, splat, face first.

There’s a fan-shaped Watteau in the Chatsworth group showing a delicate garden where a chic shepherdess sits with her swain. Every line in every plant, flower and person not only tells us what that thing is but is juicy and beautiful in itself. Wyeth’s drawn line is dry, nervous and a bit too pale, as if he insisted on working with a hard pencil, lacking the flexibility to deal with the variety of a soft one.

Rembrandt could put human empathy in a landscape; Wyeth mainly draws them like a commercial artist calculating how good the flimsy original will look in reproduction. The most ordinary of the Chatsworth masters could deal with large groups of figures. Wyeth never tries more than one.

Such observations are not cranky critical prejudice, they are objective visual facts. For all his reputation as a guardian of traditional artistic virtues, Wyeth is factually master of few of them.

Why then, facts notwithstanding, is the browser likely to feel himself touched by Wyeth while many of the masters inspire only a kind of objective admiration?

For one thing, Wyeth at his best is very good indeed. The trademark work of the group is “Braids,” a 1979 bust-length portrait of Helga wearing a dull olive turtleneck. Wyeth often does a good job with surfaces of skin, hair and fabric, but here he also gets the drawing exactly right. It’s as good as a Holbein in its magnifying-glass detail, and considerably more empathic, gently balancing the model’s handsomeness with the lurking oddity of her heavy jaw and strange blond eyelashes.

“Black Velvet” is a reclining full-length nude in which Wyeth’s realism drifts into surreal symbolism. Helga seems to float like a giantess in the night sky, as serene and awesome as death.

There are nice patches, like the softness of a crepe-skinned breast touching her folded arm, or her worn boots stretched in front of her.

The high points are so good, they make you wonder how Wyeth lets himself show the weak stuff. It seems cynical or calculating, as if he knows he can get away with it. Actually the fumbles may help him with some viewers.

When most of us hear a great symphony, we know we couldn’t make one if we tried for a lifetime. A pop song is different. It makes you think that if you plunked around on the piano long enough, you might come up with a good tune. When you look at Wyeth’s art, you feel like you might be able to do it if you worked long and carefully. Its faults may increase viewers’ identification.

Wyeth’s art is a lot like a superior pop ballad. It tells a story to a mournful tune. There is a “September Song” subtext to the Helga pictures that has nothing to do with the facts. It’s about a respectable old guy in love with an ordinary woman who is no spring chicken herself except in his eyes. She’s a decent, hard-working soul who alternates between a passion she doesn’t understand and moral culpability she knows too well. Sometimes she looks like a kid to him, sleeping naked in her attic room. Sometimes--after they’ve had a fight--she’s as tough and unapproachable as a stiff Prussian soldier. She tramps away in the snow in her fur hat and sheepskin coat. It’s just a small-town affair, but he gives it the lugubrious sweep of “Dr. Zhivago” (the movie).

People say Wyeth’s not modern, but his art evokes a modern kind of loneliness that gets to people. City folks understand the sense of isolation, and when Wyeth translates it into a rural setting where it seems more romantic, the viewer is consoled.

Wyeth’s dad was a great illustrator, and Andrew inherited his ability to ignite feelings with characterization and masked symbolism, like the threatening hooks that appear in the ceiling of Helga’s room.

Evidently Wyeth’s admirers are so enmeshed in the emotional web of his art that they no more see its shortcomings than Beatle fans heard them when they sang out of tune.