In 2006, the art critic James Gardner proclaimed Testorf the last person to be made famous by a painting.Įxplaining the series of paintings, Wyeth once said, 'The difference between me and a lot of painters is that I have to have a personal contact with my models. “I’m a figment of his imagination, like a leaf blowing in the wind … I’m there, but I’m not there.”Īccording to John Wilmerding, an art historian and the author of Andrew Wyeth: The Helga Pictures, for Wyeth to have paid such close attention to one model over such an extended period of time is a “ remarkable, if not singular” instance in American art. “I was very comfortable that nobody knew me,” she says. He was always painting himself, in me.”Īs for the hidden nature of the arrangement, Testorf found solace in being shrouded in secrecy. He always said I was ‘starved’ … so he gave me what I wanted, and he got what he wanted. She goes on to explain how their relationship was grounded in an emotional exchange. “It was, for me, an education … was being himself like I wanted to be myself, and then sharing it with me,” she says in the film. “I wanted the audience to feel the experience of their sessions-the quiet intimacy.”įor Testorf, being Wyeth’s muse was something of an awakening. “I wanted to show what that was like, to be looked at that closely,” Brass said.

Though she never quite shows her face, cinematography suggests a deep sense of trust. “Somebody was really looking at me-really seeing me.”īrass illustrates this intimacy with shots of a model, who looks much like a young Testorf, posing for the camera with a reticent grace. In the film, Testorf describes how she felt the first time Wyeth painted her. “When he reached out to me,” Brass recalled, “he said, ‘Helga told me she’s ready to talk.’” Brass’s co-director Bo Bartlett had been a longtime friend of Wyeth’s and connected the filmmaker with Testorf. “Helga is private-very careful with who she talks to and what she says,” Brass told me.

Testorf opens up about her unique relationship with Wyeth for the first time in Jesse Brass’s moving short documentary, Helga. The Helga paintings, as they came to be called, all depicted a single subject: Helga Testorf. When they were discovered, in 1986, they generated a media frenzy that extended well beyond the art world. He hid them from everyone-including his wife, who was also his business manager-in the loft of a millhouse near his home in rural Pennsylvania. Over the course of more than 15 years, Andrew Wyeth created 250 secret paintings.

Andrew wyeth helga pictures