A Villain in Pigtails

The most reviled woman in the annals of contemporary art has, for all we know, never set foot in a Chelsea gallery, never picked up a paint-brush, and never held in her hands a hyperventilating copy of Artforum. Her name is Helga Testorf, the infamous Helga of Andrew Wyeth's late middle-aged imaginings. This is the woman who was repeatedly mocked when the dozens upon dozens of portraits of her were first unveiled 20 years ago. Some 240 of them were done between 1970 and 1985, and 60 of those are now on view, for the first time in New York, at Adelson Galleries' sparkling new home at 19 East 82nd Street.

Helga Testorf, a middle-aged woman in pigtails who was Mr. Wyeth's neighbor in rural Pennsylvania, has the curious distinction of being the last person to be made famous by a painting. In this she joins that very select pantheon that includes Raphael's Fornarina, John Singer Sargent's Madame X, and the costive couple in Grant Wood's "American Gothic." Yes, John Currin's ethereally lovely wife might elicit an informed double-take along Tenth Avenue, but she is small beer compared with Helga, whose severe, Teutonic features have adorned books and postcards throughout the world.

So why do so many in the art world revile this woman? Because she was the muse to Mr. Wyeth. For almost half a century, Mr. Wyeth, now 89, has been viewed by "informed" taste as a toxic vector of mid-cult philistinism, the sort that requires a bowl of fruit to look like a bowl of fruit and that fails completely to grasp the urgent point of such upstarts as Jack the Dripper Pollock and the mad Dutchman de Kooning.

But that battle is 50 years old. Two generations on, the art world has rediscovered representational art, as attested in young painters like Mr. Currin. But the point is that those critics, artists, dealers, and hangers-on who are pleased to associate themselves with the late, great avant-garde have been reviling Mr. Wyeth for so long that even though they have made perfect peace with every article of his aesthetic creed, they can tolerate its deployment only in the art of anyone other than Mr. Wyeth himself.

All of which is by way of preamble to the 60 works of art that go on view tomorrow. Seeing them, one is hard put to understand what the fuss was about. Even if one speculates, as rumored in the past two decades, that there may have been a romantic attachment between the artist and his sitter, that still does not explain the fame that these works have enjoyed or suffered through the years.

At his best, Mr. Wyeth is a modernist both in sensibility and in compositional eccentricity. In the choiceness of his details and the variety of his depictions of those details, he proves himself to be a technician of exceptional ability. I feel no hesitation in saying that, at his best, he is a far better painter than Lucian Freud, whose early work is so reminiscent of Mr. Wyeth's.

The problem with the Helga portraits, whether as drawings, watercolors or tempera, is that they rarely show the artist at his best. Like a poet who can never liberate himself from the constraints of rhyme, Mr. Wyeth displays, in works like "The Prussian" and "Crown of Flowers," a brittle pedantry, an unwillingness to relinquish that hard-won control and overbearing selfmastery by which every pore of Helga's granite face must be registered in egg tempera. There is a dizzying spontaneity to his drawings that on one or two occasions, as in "Like Her Daughter," rise to the brilliance of Ingres. But for the most part, they go through the motions of that brilliance without quite hitting home.

Let it also be said that Mr. Wyeth is in some measure a victim of his very success. Those brooding, wind-swept watercolors that he pioneered years ago, highlighted by the bare whites of the paper on which they appear, have been the default mode of earnest amateurs at least since the 1970s. Looking at them now, one can't quite shake the specter of a gifted Sunday painter.

Commenting on his Helga paintings, Mr. Wyeth has said: "The difference between me and a lot of painters is that I have to have a personal contact with my models. … I have to become enamored. Smitten. That's what happened when I saw Helga." Ultimately, that leaven of enchantment, which Wyeth clearly felt and which he has often captured in his long career, is precisely what is absent from his portraits of Helga. But even if these paintings fall short of such early masterpieces as "Christina's World," Mr. Wyeth is a far, far better painter than his entrenched critics are ever likely to concede.

jgardner@nysun.com