Too Much of a Medium-Good Thing
By ROBERT HUGHES
WHAT THE HELGA?? was the headline on the New Republic Editor Michael Kinsley's story about last summer's convulsions over Andrew Wyeth. The question stands. Never in the history of American art had a group of paintings been so fluffily hyped. Rarely in the history of cultural journalism had magazines and newspapers that one might have expected to be fairly hard-nosed about such matters -- TIME, Newsweek, the New York Times and so on across the nation -- made so much of so little.
Like an avalanche of Styrofoam and saccharin, the Great Human Interest Saga of Andrew Wyeth and Helga Testorf, the German nymph of Chadds Ford, Pa., came roaring down the narrow defiles of silly-season journalism and obliterated the meager factual content of the story. Here, one learned, was a treasure, a secret cache of hundreds of paintings and drawings of a mystery blond done between 1971 and 1985 by America's dynastic culture hero, unbeknown to his wife, never exhibited, possibly the record of a love affair, bought en bloc for millions by a neophyte collector.
In due course it turned out that pictures of Helga, far from being secret, had been reproduced and exhibited for several years without evoking any special interest; that far from knowing nothing of them, Betsy Wyeth -- whose astute managerial sense has had much to do with her husband's success over the years -- owned quite a few; that there was no love affair; that the collector was a newsletter publisher named Leonard E.B. Andrews, who planned to reap ^ vast profits from selling reproductions of Helga's pale and sturdy torso; and that the whole thing had been cooked up among him, the Wyeths and the editors of Art & Antiques, a sort of cultural airline magazine mainly devoted to the breathless chronicling of market trends.
But by then the legend was well away. J. Carter Brown, the director of Washington's National Gallery of Art, leaped onto the bandwagon with a scissor-legged agility worthy of Tom Mix, committing his museum to an exhibit of some 125 of the 240 pencil drawings, watercolors and temperas of Helga. Billed as "a set of fascinating documents in the odyssey of the American artistic achievement," with a first printing of 250,000 catalogs, le cirque Helga opens this week and will, of course, be jam-packed until late September, when it begins its progress to Boston, Houston, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Detroit, where it will finish in January 1989. The Metropolitan in New York City rather pointedly refused it.
The show is a record of 15 years of work with one model at a depth of detail that would be utterly fascinating with a greater artist -- a Manet, a Degas or even a Winslow Homer -- but that at Wyeth's level of achievement seems almost tiresome. The bulk of the show is pencil sketches and watercolors, grouped around a dozen or so finished images in drybrush and tempera. To study an artist's sketches is to go behind the scenes of his talent, to see how the mechanisms of his pictorial thought work; one sees each twist in the evolution of form and idea. But the interest of such a spectacle depends on the extent of the talent.
The time is past when one could dismiss Wyeth as nothing more that a sentimental illustrator, as critics irked by his popular appeal regularly did a decade or more ago. True, his work is grounded in illustration and often fails to transcend it. Not a few of the images of Helga lying naked on a bed or tramping resolutely through the snow in her Loden coat have the banal neatness of things done for a women's magazine. Some of them, like the technically impressive watercolor In the Orchard, 1974, are as deadly in their "sensitiveness" as greeting cards. But there are some fine drawings here, moments of vision caught with attentiveness and precision, that have a lot more visual oomph than the more laboriously finished works. And two or three of the paintings are marvels of iconic condensation. Like a good second-rate novelist who can rise to first-rate episodes, Wyeth can surprise you.
But the surprises are few and far between. What one gets instead is a soothing reliability of product -- the familiar "world of Wyeth," which has such a vast following in America and has lately acquired a smaller one in the Soviet Union, no doubt because his version of American landscape (bare birches, patches of snow, brown stubble, rocks and iced-up puddles, all under a white sky) looks so like Siberia. To gauge how the roots of his imagination go, one need only compare his painting of the nude Helga with a black ribbon round her neck, face averted, floating in a soup of dark shadow, with the work on which it is based: Manet's Olympia. There, one has all the contrast between what is deep and what is genteel, between brazen, ironic intelligence and mere sensibility, between the harsh confrontational skills of a great talent and the tepid virtuosity of a popular one. This show is too much of a medium-good thing, and its ever docile public has been led to it by the nose.