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Library Journal Review

For 15 years, America's most popular living artist worked in secret with neighbor Helga Testorf as model. The resultsome 240 pencil sketches, watercolors, drybrush, and temperas, concerned with Helga in all aspects, nude and clothedare here shown in 100 high-quality color plates and 160 black and white illustrations. Works in progress reveal the artist's methods; finished works, an obsession with his model as awesome as his technique. Wilmerding, deputy director of the National Gallery, contributes an informative text, further clarified by the artist's own observations. Gloria K. Rensch, formerly with Vigo Cty. P.L., Terre Haute, Ind. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

The announcement nine months ago that 240 hitherto unknown paintings and drawings by Andrew Wyeth had been bought by collector Leonard Andrews and would go on show was front-page news. Abrams, which helped to arrange the initial exhibit at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., here publishes the entire collection of Wyeth's renderings of his neighbor Helga Testorf, with a text by the gallery's deputy director. There is also a rather foolish piece by Andrews (``I personally feel he is so far ahead of any other living artist that it is hard to name the second best''). The pictures, meticulously reproduced, range widely in mood, from sensuous nudes to somber studies of Helga in assorted rustic landscapes and interiors; they are examples of fine craftsmanship but continue to leave open the question of whether Wyeth is more than a highly skilled illustrator with a flair for drama and atmosphere. In any case, the controversy in the art world about Wyeth's stature (merely hinted at in a footnote here), and the traditional romantic speculation about artist and model, seem certain to fuel sales. 400,000 first printing; BOMC main selection. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

CHOICE Review

This catalog accompanies Wyeth's 240 pictures of Helga Testorf executed between 1971 and 1985. Acquired by Mr. L.E.B. Andrews as an archival collection and tribute to the artist, the exhibition has begun in Washington and will continue into 1989 in five major museums. The catalog includes 294 illustrations, 96 in color, of works in tempera, watercolor, drybrush, and pencil. Wilmerding writes a conscientious and responsible commentary including much, if not all, that will be argued on the positive side about the Helga suite. Helga-nude and clothed-emerges as if belonging to a primordial saga at once intimate and universal. Inevitably this exhibition will provoke both prurient and critical responses (cf. 19th-century neoclassical nudes). Wyeth's compositions of quietism and introspection, his colors and textures, appear here as before. Although he has done other series on individuals-Christina, Karl, Siri-the angles of vision here seem more varied. Wyeth is now older than the ``old Rembrandt'' in whose late works critics have discovered painterly and psychological insights. The Helga suite invites similar evaluations.-W.B. Miller, Colby College