The Andrew & Betsy Wyeth Study Center of the Brandywine Museum of Art confirms that this object is recorded in Betsy James Wyeth’s files.

Maybe it was because he was obsessed with the movies that Andrew Wyeth seemed to understand instinctively the modernist idea of the serial or composite portrait that originated with Alfred Stieglitz, in the conceptual breakthrough that was his photographic representation of his wife, Georgia O’Keeffe. Stieglitz’s magnum opus would be this decades-long portrait-in-the-making, encompassing 331 individual images. Stieglitz portrayed O’Keeffe both directly and obliquely, by her expressive face and also by her sensuous body and hands in isolation, which he regarded as extensions of her art. The couple’s intimacy, and ultimately their emotional distance, is played out in their give and take before the lens.

For Andrew Wyeth, too, a portrait was not just a resemblance: it was an extraction of qualities that make us human. It necessarily took shape over time, which is why, for Wyeth, portraits usually required the slow, meditative process of tempera or drybrush. Wyeth’s most intense relationships yielded serial portraits over decades, just as Stieglitz’s had, as Wyeth sought that intimacy with a subject that reveals humanity most starkly. His deep friendship with Christina Olson in Maine over almost three decades inspired hundreds of images, direct and also symbolic portraits, as he worked to capture the very spirit of the woman who inhabited the centuries-old Olson family house at Hathorne Point, the entire world of this woman who had lost the use of her legs at a young age. Christina trusted Wyeth as she did only her selfless brother Alvaro, and Wyeth painted her as he loved her, unconditionally. In the years after Christina Olson’s death in 1968, Wyeth sketched and painted, with deepening focus, Karl and Anna Kuerner, his German neighbors in Chadds Ford, as he was drawn into the claustrophobic spaces of their home; and even as he painted each of them alone, in isolation, he effectively recorded what he was allowed to witness of their tortuous relationship as husband and wife. And then, famously, Wyeth slowly drew out into the light a private relationship of man and woman in the series of drawings, watercolors, and temperas that flowed in secrecy, over a period of fifteen years, from Wyeth’s obsession with the enigmatic Helga Testorf.

The intimacy that the artist hoped and needed to find with a new model required secrecy if it were to be sustained and that allure of a new encounter, for both artist and subject, if it were to be real. In the confines of tiny Chadds Ford, where Wyeth knew and was known by all the neighbors, such a subject had not presented herself—that is, until in the spring of 1970 when he encountered the thirty-year-old Helga Testorf. She had been a stranger to him, it seems, even though she had been living nearby with her husband and four children for nearly a decade. German Helga and her German-born American husband, John Testorf, were the German Kuerners’ nearest neighbors; they lived close by the railroad crossing on Ring Road, below Kuerner’s Hill, where Wyeth’s father, N.C. Wyeth, was tragically killed in 1945 by an on-coming train. Wyeth had already withdrawn to the close confines of the Kuerners’ house to draw and paint when the long-homesick Helga arrived there to help Anna as she tended to a terminally-ill Karl [1].

[…]

When she entered on the scene, Helga was “like spring following winter,” Wyeth said [2]. She brought new life to that place of death, the Kuerner house. Wyeth’s quickening emotions at Helga’s arrival surely infuse his Evening at Kuerners Study (private collection), in which pools of tender green watercolor signal the winter hills just coming alive, even in the last light that is the dying Karl’s presence there. She filled the landscape now, bringing new life, too, to that other dark place that Wyeth had always associated with death, Kuerner’s Hill and the railroad crossing below. Wyeth watched her come and go on the path to the Kuerners’ house, and the rush of his feelings is evident in the ecstatic brushwork of watercolor. For a while he kept a distance: he made a first tender portrait study of Helga in her distinctly German puff-sleeved peasant dress and dirndl as she sat for him, rather tentatively we sense, in Anna Kuerner’s sewing room. As Wyeth watched Helga with Karl and Anna Kuerner, talking and singing in German, he recognized the continuity that she embodied for him: Helga would now absorb a lifetime of Wyeth’s associations with the Kuerner farm, Kuerner’s Hill, and the dying Karl. The naturalness of their evolving relationship led artist and model easily to a level of trust. The emotional connection that soon developed between Andrew Wyeth and Helga Testorf was that of mature adults, both experienced in intimacy.

Wyeth drew and painted Helga out of sight of others—inside the Kuerner house, in an upstairs bedroom where Helga modeled and napped; and outdoors, only when they could be alone deep within the Wyeths’ apple orchard.

[…]

Indoors, Helga is woman, but outdoors she is that golden haired German who, in her loden green cape coat, seems even to dress the part of Germans as depicted in the old movies of the Great War, which fired Wyeth’s imagination still. Strong and blonde and indefatigable, Helga manifested all the qualities that Wyeth associated with romanticized images of German soldiers, with the German Kuerners, and no doubt with his own Swiss-German grandmother, too [3].

Looking back, we can see that the Helga pictures represented another kind of indoor/outdoor balancing act for the artist, another seesawing, this between his private musings and the public’s expectations of him. Helga could not be all-consuming for Wyeth. The fact is, the years from 1970 to 1985 proved to be among the artist’s most productive, and some of his most psychologically complex, symbolically rich, and compositionally ambitious works happened around his Helga work.

—Patricia Junker, excerpt from “Andrew Wyeth: Helga Unframed,” Schoelkopf Gallery, 2024

[1] Wyeth’s biographer Richard Meryman tells us that Wyeth believed that the Helga pictures were so radically different that they would revive his stature in the art world. He was filled with self-doubt at this time, 1970, saying to Meryman that he was “a forgotten artist who’s done my work and had my little thing and that’s that.” Meryman, Andrew Wyeth: A Secret Life (New York: Harper Collins, 1996), p. 364

[2] Wyeth, in Andrew Wyeth and Thomas Hoving, Wyeth on Helga: The Helga Paintings in Andrew Wyeth’s Own Words (Naples, Florida: Naples Museum of Art, 2006), p. 7. See the details on their encounter and developing relationship in this author’s “Andrew Wyeth: Rebel,” in David Cateforis, ed., Rethinking Andrew Wyeth (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), pp. 167-170. Also see this author’s “Couples, 1968-1988,” in Patricia Junker and Audrey Lewis, eds., Andrew Wyeth: In Retrospect (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), pp. 141-160.

[3] Wyeth explained these associations to Thomas Hoving in Andrew Wyeth: Autobiography (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1995), p. 104