Between 1970 and 1985, Andrew Wyeth painted and sketched a large series of portraits using the same model, Helga Testorf. The Helga Pictures, as they came to be called, were not known to the public until Wyeth announced them in 1986. They were displayed in the National Gallery of Art in Washington in 1987, the first time the museum has exhibited the work of a living artist.
Done in watercolor, oil paint and pencil, The Helga Pictures represent the best work of one of America's foremost artists, and they are accordingly celebrated. So now that ekphrastic poetry is all the rage, it seems fitting that we have not just a poem, but an entire collection dedicated to the portraits. Nancy Frederiksen's Making Her Way--the Search for Helga spends eighty-odd pages depicting, interpreting, and generally luxuriating in the art. Told from the model's perspective, the poems are not necessarily a paean to Wyeth himself--in several places, in fact, Frederiksen describes his failure to capture Helga's mood on the canvas. She is portrayed as an artist on equal ground with the painter; he cannot express what she does not emote. From "Blind Faith":
Someday is in her eyes, that illusive
Future where hope resides.
To her the image is clear, a ray
of hope lights her days.
Many of the poems focus on the act of creation, rather than the art itself, and Helga's predicament--a woman with a rich but obscure family life who is now being recast, by another, for the public eye. Frederiksen lauds her independence, her determination that Wyeth paint her as herself. From the title poem:
Let no one define you.
Hold in your own two hands
the brush that creates your
image--move, edging even,
into the future.
Some of the poems come off as rather pedestrian, relying heavily on commonplace metaphors like sea and fire. But other pieces, particularly the ones that employ a subtle rhyme, surprise and delight, getting beyond mere words or canvas to catch a glimpse of the woman herself, Helga, whom no art can entirely contain. And a glimpse is all we'll get. As Frederiksen writes in "Uniform": "You paint the coat. / She wears it."