Michael Palin in Wyeth's World

This is Maine on America's northeast coast.

It's the perfect holiday destination for wealthy New Englanders seeking

to escape the heat and humidity of the summer months.

Thank you.

Between July and September, each year, these sparsely populated

coastal towns swell to capacity with handsome, well-heeled vacationers.

But there's another side to Maine,

one where people graft hard for a living on land and sea -

a rural, rugged existence which fed the penetrating gaze of artist

Andrew Wyeth

and fuelled his long and extraordinary career.

Wyeth not only immortalised the American landscape, he created

interior worlds, hidden histories,

intrigue and magic.

His unflinching vision didn't always please the art world

but it captured the hearts and minds of the American people.

My exploration of Wyeth's long life and prolific work begins here,

at this remote farmstead.

It was this rural side of Maine that, in 1948,

inspired Andrew Wyeth to paint his masterpiece,

a work that became an icon of American art and a painting

which has puzzled and intrigued me from the first time I saw it.

Wyeth's most famous painting was named after its subject -

a woman he once described as a wounded gull.

The painting was called, Christina's World.

The backdrop to Wyeth's painting of Christina's World is

this 18th-century farmhouse.

Now preserved as a state museum,

the farm once owned by the Olson family

has become a destination for modern pilgrims who want

to experience the almost spiritual significance of this location.

Janice Kasper, once a tour guide here, shows me around.

So, here's the house and it's been here for quite a while

and you can see it's... Weathered.

..weathered. Yeah, yeah.

When Andrew Wyeth first started to paint here during his

family summer holidays in the 1940s, the farm was owned

and run by Alvaro Olson and his unmarried sister, Christina.

They lived without electricity into the 1950s.

They collected rainwater off the roof...was their water supply

and they lived off the land.

Yeah.

So, I want to show you something in this hallway...

..and if we scoot down... Yeah.

..this is Christina's refrigerator, so that when I slide it open...

Oh, yes. ..you can feel how cold it is.

And you can see the shelves. Absolutely, yeah. Yeah?

And it's also a way to get down and check the cistern. Simple technology.

Yes. Yeah.

Alvaro and Christina's hand-to-mouth existence on the farm

was not the only challenge they faced.

When Christina was a little girl, her mother noticed that she fell a lot.

And then, as she got older, it got progressively worse,

her legs got weaker and then by the time I think she was in her

forties, she pretty much lost the use of her legs.

And she was one of these tough, proud stubborn women,

who refused to use cane or crutches or a wheelchair.

She was going to get around on her own ability and in this house,

I understand, she would hitch herself around in a chair or

she would crawl and outside she crawled.

Christina's disability meant that the upstairs

floors of the house were out of her reach.

They were closed up and used for storage,

until Andrew Wyeth began to use the rooms as makeshift studios.

There's one painting he made from up here, which for me,

really captures the essence of the place.

When Wyeth prised up this window, it hadn't been opened for years.

Such was his attention to detail that he waited for two

months for the wind to change in the right

direction before completing the painting.

It was also from up here that he first saw Christina,

dragging herself through the grass like, as he put it,

a crab on a New England shore.

This painting really is much less simple than you think at first sight.

I mean, I remember when I first saw it, I thought that

the figure in the foreground was a young girl and we know that

Christina here was in her mid-fifties

and she was a paraplegic...

and that's the way she moved through the grass.

You know, when you understand it's not a purely realistic picture,

he's trying to express something through this picture,

to try and work out what it is he's expressing...

And from what I can see here is Christina looking up at the farm,

which she can never get away from and there's something there

almost...she's almost trapped.

It's almost like she won't get away, despite this vast open space,

despite all the potential of it,

there's something quite dark going on there.

So is she trying to get away or is she trying to get back?

I don't know. It's just...it's a puzzle. Raises so many questions.

Although Christina was an important muse for Wyeth,

he also painted scenes in and around the Olson farm for more

than 30 summers, producing over 300 distinctive works.

When Christina Olson died in 1968,

it closed an important chapter in Wyeth's career...

..but by far the largest portion of his work was created in a very

different landscape, 500 miles south of here.

Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, Wyeth's permanent

home from his birth in 1917 to his death in 2009,

is a small town with a big place in American history.

These meadows by the Brandywine River were once battlefields,

almost 220 years ago to the day.

British and American soldiers fought each other here

in the War of Independence or the Great Revolutionary War,

as the Brandywine Re-enactors prefer to call it.

Have you ever had the pleasure of firing one of these? No, no...

Oh, my friend. Is it a great pleasure? I think so.

I can see you like it, there's a sparkle in your eye,

which makes me think there's an element of...some danger there.

Do you have a pair of glasses? Yeah. Just for safety's sake.

Just to be careful. There might be some stuff flying about?

You get powder that flashes up when the powder is ignited.

It's meant to go that way. Well, you know, it will, it will.

OK...will this kick fire?

There shouldn't be that much of a kick cos there isn't a bullet in it.

OK.

GUN FIRES

HE LAUGHS

More, please!

Sorry, sorry! British. You got 'em running, you got 'em running.

How important was the battle that was fought

here in the Brandywine river? Oh, the battle was very important.

This is, one, the largest land battle of the revolution

and you had the British over on this side over here

and the Americans on this side.

Now, the landscape is not going to be very reflective of what it was

in the 18th century, you had a lot more concealment, a lot more cover.

In the morning hours, it was just basic scattered musket

shot across the river, back and forth, between the two armies.

But in the afternoon that's when the British started crossing

and the fierce fighting really took place.

SHOTS FIRING

Locals say the river behind me ran red with the blood of dying

and injured bodies of British and American officers.

But despite the setback at the Brandywine river,

the Americans went on to win their war against the British

oppressors and claim this vast country as their own -

a country that Wyeth's father raised his son to always feel

proud to belong to.

Andrew Wyeth was born into a wealthy,

artistic family of Swiss-German origin.

Known as Andy, he was the youngest of five children,

doted on by his three older sisters, particularly Ann,

his constant childhood companion.

So, what was it like, you know, for your mother and Andrew,

who were two years apart, growing up in this house?

What was their relationship, how did they get along?

They were wonderful friends. Of course, they slept in the same bed.

They played together

and as children they did everything together in the beginning.

At some point, I mean, they drew, there was always paper.

But they played up in these woods, they dressed up,

they played Robin Hood, they played knights.

They did all the things that Grandpa was painting.

They young Andrew's love of storybook war

and heroism was fed not only by the battle-scarred history around him

but also by his great influence and teacher,

his larger-than-life father, Newell Convers Wyeth.

Known as NC or Pa to his family, he was a celebrated artist,

sought-after for his dynamic picture-book illustrations

which brought history to life.

His work for Scribner's Classics had generations of readers spellbound.

NC was so successful as a commercial artist

he was able to build a grand family home,

construct a studio behind it and pay for the surrounding 18 acres

of land with a commission for one single work...

..Treasure Island.

You know, he was so real to all of us.

It was always what Pa said, what Pa did, what he thought.

I mean, he created this world for us all.

He dressed up as Old Chris. Santa Claus?

And he actually got up on the roof

and he stamped around and he rang bells down that chimney...

..and woke them up.

And they came down to see him just out of the corner of their eye, leaving.

There's something about this family that I think is remarkable.

There's a quality of joy and life, of joy in everything and Grandpa had

that and my mother had that and she kept on with that and Andy had that.

It's just opening the box, it's the ribbon,

it's just joy at life...

of just... "God, isn't it great!?"

Andy's childhood was exciting and idyllic

but also dogged by ill health -

recurring chest infections and a problem with his hip,

which affected him throughout his life.

But neither of them seemed to temper his inquisitive nature

and boisterous creative energy.

And so he was kind of an "enfant terrible"

in a way, you know.

He was allowed, you know,

he was precocious and he was not denied anything.

NC decided his youngest son was too fragile for public school,

so Andy was tutored at home.

He was free to roam around his father's studio,

where epic scenes of American heroism were being conjured up

with the help of period costumes and historical regalia.

NC Wyeth was an enormously successful commercial artist

and yet all this didn't really matter to him.

He was determined to shape his gifted young son into the kind

of fine art painter that he himself had never really become.

He wanted his son to be free, both artistically and personally.

Andrew found heroism not in a costumed and constructed

world like his father's but in the reality of everyday life.

His first show at the Macbeth Gallery in New York in 1937

was a sell-out.

So impressed was his father that he proclaimed that his son,

Andrew, was on the right track to reach the pinnacle of American art.

So, no pressure there!

This is an early self-portrait of Andrew, painted just after

he'd had big success in New York with an exhibition.

He was 21 years old.

I think it's quite interesting cos he's sort of projecting

himself as a serious, successful artist but at the same time,

there's something in the eyes,

a kind of weariness of "don't read me too easily" -

there's something of a mystery there.

Erm, and this was one of the first paintings that he

painted in egg tempera.

He'd rejected the oil paints that his father, NC Wyeth, had brought

him up to use and I can only think that that must have been deliberate.

That to try and escape from the shadow of his celebrated father,

he chose different subjects

but also different materials to paint those subjects.

The Brandywine River Museum houses the largest collection of both

NC and Andrew Wyeth's work.

Joyce Stoner and her team are tasked with the conserving

the painting of both father and son.

The self-portrait that he did,

was that the first time he used egg tempera?

Oh, yes, he hits the ground running with the self-portrait

and then the portrait of Walt Anderson.

They're done so similarly and they were,

sort of, brothers under the skin at that time.

Andrew was fascinated with outsiders

and especially trickster-pranksters.

He had to feel a special kinship and Walt Anderson,

who is pictured in Young Swede is a wonderful example of this.

Walt is a trickster, he is a lobster poacher, apparently he and Andy

would steal boats together and so they were...

He loved anyone who was a pirate.

And so Walt was an original pirate

and you see how he paints Walt as this incredibly handsome

young man that they did things together and had fun and he

loved it, that he was a pirate and he was always breaking the rules.

Andrew Wyeth also bucked the trend

when it came to his painting technique.

He chose to work in egg tempera, a challenging medium,

barely used since the 16th century.

So, it started with someone picking up an egg...

what are you going to do with it?

I think you're going to do it. How do you like it, scrambled, boiled?

What we're going to do is we're going to separate the egg yolk

from the white, so go ahead and break the egg. OK... There we go.

Let the white fall into the jar.

Yeah, there we are and there's the yolk and now what?

Pass it from hand to hand and you can wipe your hands on that.

I've honestly never done this before, not ever, ever.

Oh, I'm quite good at this, actually. Whoa, no! OK. Oh, dear.

Well, there we are, you see.

That's why we've brought more than one. I was getting over-confident.

'Wyeth's decision to use egg tempera was bold.

'Not only did he need to mix paint from egg yolk

'and pigments every time he started

'but its quick drying properties meant he had to work fast.'

And mix that up, we now have paint.

OK. Why did they do that? Why did discover that egg

and pigment went together particularly well?

It's actually a very good binder to hold pigments to a surface,

so a painting...

We know between the Middle Ages

up until around 1500, it was the dominant paint medium in Europe.

Right. So when we think about it, especially with early Italian

paintings, so the early masters, Giotto through Masaccio.

Was it discovered in the Renaissance or before?

It actually predates the Renaissance,

so if we think of late medieval paintings,

the earlier icons are all painted in egg tempera.

He loved taking tempera where it shouldn't go

and when people told him

you couldn't paint tempera at night, that it wasn't a night medium,

he painted Walt Anderson again, poaching lobsters

and is called Night Hauling and he'd push tempera to look like night.

If you also look up close at the temperas,

they look like trodden weeds up close.

It looks like a micro Jackson Pollock.

It looks like a little explosion

because he is doing things you're not supposed to do with tempera.

So these are the Andrew Wyeth Galleries

and they're changed periodically

with wonderful things, the Young Swede

and this fabulous thing of his dog, it looks like a railroad.

Here are all the different ones he painted in Chadds Ford.

Joyce, there's a perception that when you look at Wyeth's work,

you're looking at the work of a realist,

albeit maybe a romantic realist and then you see a painting

like this and that's almost abstract in the shapes and all that.

How did he see what he was doing

and how did others see what he was doing?

Oh, well, absolutely. He was very aware of powerful shapes and forms.

If you look at the roof

and the powerful beams coming out at you,

it's a very...and the shadows,

it's very powerful and very spooky, really.

Jets out against the grey sky. But next to it there's this sketch.

Did he do preliminary sketches?

He often did preliminary sketches,

while he was working on conceptualising

what the sort of magic realism,

this spooky, this chilly sense of death...

So this is a wonderful comparison of the whoosh with the precise

and showing them right together.

So this was...is this a watercolour? Yes, it's ink and watercolour.

And you can just see it slightly more, the greys are slightly

lighter and the shadings on the birds are slightly lighter.

Here's a much bolder, blacker shade. Exactly, exactly...

Here we see another version of the two worlds of Andrew Wyeth -

the free splash and dash of the watercolour and then the exactitude

but they do work together, as you can see him

working out in his mind how to do this.

Was part of the reason why he chose to paint in tempera to distinguish

himself from his father and his father's preference for oils?

Absolutely!

Andrew had to rebel from NC and so you can really look at how the

media bounce around as they try to get out of each other's way,

cos there is tremendous love

and tremendous competition in that family. Yes.

It was not just Andrew Wyeth's unique painting style which helped

him break away from his father's often overbearing influence.

It was also the love of a determined young woman,

whom he met in the summer of 1939.

Betsy James was brought up in New England, the daughter

of a Welsh picture editor and a well-bred Christian mother.

With her striking looks she was a force to be reckoned with.

Despite NC's objections, Andrew, not one to pussyfoot around,

proposed to Betsy within weeks of meeting her. She accepted.

Betsy was 18 and Andrew was 21.

The marriage produced two boys - Nicky and Jamie -

and lasted 69 years until Wyeth's death.

I was very fortunate to run into her.

I didn't know I had that many brains so young.

We're different.

It's not always peaceful but nothing good is peaceful. Remember that.

If you have got too much peace, God help you.

You have to have a kick in the tail, once in a while.

But we have a great time.

We don't have a dull moment, I can tell you that.

Wanting to keep his young son close, NC gifted the newlyweds

a property near to the Wyeth family home.

The old schoolhouse became not only a home for his young family

but also Andrew's first studio of his own.

Away from his father, Betsy's influence over him

increased as their son, Jamie, remembers.

It was a painting,

a tempera which was a medium that he was just really starting with

and it was just a figure walking away in a field.

And he was very excited about it and asked his father to come see it

and his father said, "Andy, you know, it's remarkable,

"but you need to put a gun in his hand and you have to have dogs,"

but completely missing what his son was doing. Yes.

And Betsy, who was probably 18,

said, "Don't listen to that old fart.

"You do exactly what you're doing." Yeah. Pretty amazing.

With no knowledge of painting, she got it and she obviously

adored his work and thought, "This is incredible,"

what's being produced here.

"This is a world that is extraordinary." Yeah.

My father was very close to his father and his father was

very close to him, I mean, he just wanted to control him.

Young Betsy James was his escape away from that.

But in a way, he married his father.

I mean, she became totally the one then controlling but gave him

freedom to do exactly what he wanted but kept track of what was

being painted, what was... Titles, he titled everything.

Did she? So, Christina's World... Totally. Really?

He just painted and then showed it to her.

Betsy took every opportunity to promote her husband's work.

Before long, the marriage evolved into a business partnership,

but the boundaries between family and work began to blur.

Well, I mean, it wasn't that my father was going to work

putting a tie on.

It was just he would wander in from the breakfast table and we

would wander in as children, lying on the floor here doing drawing.

But it was just... this was our house.

When you see some of these drawings here,

do they bring back memories? Do you know what they're all about?

When he was working, he would have drawings tacked all over the wall,

all over the floor.

As you see, there are footprints, dog prints stepping on them.

I mean, he would be completely immersed in what he was doing,

totally forgetting time and in fact, he was a wild painter.

I mean, water was thrown, paint was all over the floor.

He liked accidents. Really? Really? Interesting.

And then it all gets filtered down, the final product.

Starts to be distilled. Interesting, yeah.

He is a very peculiar painter - Andrew Wyeth.

I mean, it's this funny, airless, crystalline world

particularly in the temperas and it was a very strange,

peculiar world which I think makes his work extraordinary. Yeah.

Although Wyeth had an official studio indoors, his unofficial

outdoor studio was the whole of Chadds Ford.

Andrew Wyeth painted uninterrupted for almost seven full decades,

one of the longest careers of any artist.

What he painted here at Chadds Ford

was confined to just a few square miles.

This small piece of territory and the people who occupied it

revealed to Wyeth a world so deep and detailed that no matter how

often he painted it, he always discovered something new.

But there was one location within Chadds Ford which would

become more important to him than any other. At the Kuerner farm,

Wyeth would produce hundreds of sketches

and paintings over a period of 70 years.

As with Christina and the Olsen farm, the inspiration that Wyeth

drew from this one location was boundless.

He started painting it when he was 15

and stopped the year before he died.

He was fascinated not just by the farm and the landscape around it,

but also by the Kuerner family who lived here -

enigmatic outsiders, German immigrants.

He was fascinated by their connection

with the Teutonic old world of his ancestors.

Wyeth was attracted to the rhythms of life here as well as

to its owners - farmer, Karl Kuerner, his wife, Anna,

and the children.

Their son, Karl Junior, remembers seeing Wyeth painting in

and around the farm.

Everybody liked Andrew Wyeth.

He would come early mornings.

We never knew he would be up in the woods painting or we'd be

cutting along and we'd see him

and we would say hello and I'd say, "Andy,"

I said, "stay away from the hay field.

I said, "We'll come with our big cutter and we cut your toes off!"

Karl Junior's father intrigued Wyeth,

not just because of his German ancestry but also his experience

in battle as a machine-gunner in the First World War.

My father talked a lot about the First World War.

It gave Andy a lot of ideas and being in the trenches,

you know, that fierce fighting...

my father lost a lot of his close friends.

And he says, "When you're in the trenches,

"you have to keep your head down." To me it made him very stern.

It was like working for a German officer.

You take the good with the bad.

Karl's mother, Anna, was a continual source of fascination for Wyeth.

He portrayed her as a lost soul,

an almost spectral figure.

My mother was very quiet, congenial.

I think she was homesick,

she wanted to take us children all back to Germany.

My father said, "No, you can't do that now."

He says, "We're here, we have to make the best of it."

I understand that there was a Wyeth family tragedy here

and you were working on the farm close to where it happened.

We were up there husking corn. We heard this crash.

I thought an aeroplane come down or something. A big noise.

Big noise. And I said to all the fellows, "Wait here, I'll walk down,

"see what happened."

Andrew Wyeth's father, NC,

was driving his car with his four-year-old grandson in the back

when tragedy struck on a railroad at the foot of Kuerner's farm.

NC Wyeth and his young grandson were killed outright

when the car in which they were travelling

was hit by a train on this railway line in October 1945.

But no-one knows the cause of the accident.

Was it mechanical failure in the car,

was it a temporary heart attack,

was it, as some people say, that NC was sketching at the time?

The only thing we really know

is that we shall never know.

We are coming to the location of my father's...

where he was killed.

And that brought it to a head to me because it...all this life that

I had had by myself over here, I didn't really tell anyone about it.

It all became the fact that he was killed here,

it all became very pointed to me in it its meaning.

Wasn't just because it was a handsome looking hill or a lovely old barn,

that wasn't it at all.

It was just...began...became sort of a memory of everything

to me that meant something to me.

It all made this whole place very poignant to me.

Not just a farm but a certain truth.

It gave me a reason to paint.

Up to that point, I was painting but I think I was painting pictures

and then there became a real reason, an urge to do something.

Emotional reason.

I think it made me.

NC's accident was not the only tragedy Wyeth would associate

with Kuerner's farm.

When Karl Kuerner was diagnosed with cancer in the early 1970s,

Wyeth charted his slow decline

from warrior to wasted body,

a shadow of his own father's death, always present.

Something else had been happening at Kuerner's farm

during the years Wyeth was charting Karl's fading health.

It all started when Andrew met the woman brought in

to care for the sick farmer.

On hot summer afternoons, she took to resting in the upstairs

attic, which Wyeth had begun to use as one of his temporary studios.

She was Prussian - like the Kuerners, a German immigrant.

She was married with children, in her mid thirties.

Her name was Helga Testorf.

Andrew started to paint her sleeping, waking, thinking, dressed

and undressed, but for 15 years, he hid away every painting he produced,

not just from the outside world but also from his wife

and business partner, Betsy.

Helga became the catalyst for one of the greatest

scandals in American art history and one of its best kept secrets.

He continued to paint his usual subjects

and by producing a steady flow of work,

Wyeth was able to paint Helga without arousing suspicion.

But the concealment couldn't last.

When the Helga paintings were first revealed, how did it happen,

what was told to the public?

They were revealed as the secret body of work, kept private even from

his own family and especially his wife and therefore he must be

hiding something beyond just the fact that he painted these nudes.

That was, sort of,

the subtext of almost everything

that was written at the time,

that he had betrayed his wife, Betsy, in some way.

Betsy Wyeth had been the driving force behind an extremely

successful business, producing reproductions of her

husband's work for sale to the general public.

But it was not popular with everyone.

Most of the critics took pot shots based on reproductions

they had seen or works that were in public collections,

which weren't that many.

I mean, aside from Christina's World at the Museum of Modern Art,

there weren't that many hanging in museums around the country

for a variety of reasons. Yeah.

And I think for New York critics in particular, they were just

dumbfounded by an artist who would paint farms and fishermen.

I think that aspect of his work is part and parcel of what critics see

as a sort of nostalgia of looking back at earlier periods of time.

Frankly, Edward Hopper did the same thing.

He wasn't a real fan of cities,

he was kind of lamenting the loss of farms and rural life.

And there is that heritage that is very deep-seated

and embedded in the American psyche, I think, in some ways.

However controversial Wyeth's output was amongst the critics,

it didn't stop the 250 works that make up the Helga cycle being

sold almost immediately.

They went to a single collector,

for what was reportedly around six million dollars.

The national scandal had only helped push up the price.

You know, Andy had his own reasons for what he did

and I think part of it

was in a nature of a surprise for the world but also for his wife.

He wanted to prove, in his own way, that he was capable of this rather,

in those days and in his mind,

a body of work that was going to raise some eyebrows.

He wanted to go deeper, he wanted to build on that early success

but he was trying to get at certain aspects of the human

condition that were, and ours, important to him.

You know, change, life, death, sex, all of those things are

kind of the themes that he explored throughout his work in various ways.

In almost three decades since the scandal broke,

Helga Testorf has rarely spoken about her experiences.

Today, she's agreed to meet me and talk about her years with Wyeth.

Hello, Helga. Hello there, sir. Michael. How are you, Michael?

Michael Palin, very nice to meet you.

Thank you so much for talking to us. You're very welcome.

It's great to meet you.

Can I ask you...? Just take you slightly back

to the circumstances which led to him

revealing the 15 years' worth of paintings he did of you.

How did that come about? Did he tell you...?

I don't have to tell you that.

That is so obvious.

It was expected of him to put out paintings like pancakes.

And no real artist wants

to be controlled of producing

paintings that looked like postcards, one after another.

So are you saying that he was going through a period

when he was producing things that were sort of what, commercial?

Sure, just like that.

He needed to be painting for himself.

And he knew that the paintings he had done with you were the truth.

He didn't have to show them to anybody. He could learn.

He needed to feed himself.

Not always have some critic tell him, "Oh, this is good, this is not good."

When he was a most peaceful man, why would he argue with them?

They didn't know any better.

He was the best critic there was.

And together we critiqued, believe me. I learned a lot.

And he listened to me too.

It was so important what you did for him.

Was that something, a relationship that worked straightaway? Yeah.

Or was it something that developed?

I always wanted to be a model or an artist or a movie star.

It was childish dream because my mother always said,

"You've got to have a profession first."

So the fact that he wanted you to model for him...that must

have been, for you, a wonderful sort of release, in a way.

Yes, it was, yes, it was. I couldn't believe it.

But, you know, when I do something it's not just 100%,

it's all or nothing.

Roughly how many hours a day would you be working?

Oh, my God, at the beginning we did eight hours sometimes.

Eight hours? It was long.

He always said, "Are you tired yet?"

I said, "No...keep on going."

I guess, we both knew... whatever it takes.

There's such a stillness in a lot of the paintings, was that hard to get?

It's not just a question of lying on the bed and going to sleep.

It was hard...you're sore. Cos you have to hold a certain position?

Mmm.

Very sore.

When the paintings he'd made of you were revealed

and the press got hold of it, I mean... Wasn't supposed to.

Was it something you were prepared for? No! Of course not.

Never! It wasn't supposed to be shown until after his death, he totally...

Really?

He totally... I think he was sort of caught in something...to come out.

I don't know how it came out.

Are you saying that he didn't want the paintings to be seen until...

No. ..after his death? Mm-hm. Is that what you're saying?

It was his promise to me.

But Mother Nature had other plans.

When the story of the Helga paintings broke in 1985,

the American press bombarded Helga's family home,

hounding her to speak out about a supposed affair with Andrew Wyeth.

All hell broke loose, I think.

All the paparazzis who were after us couldn't find me. Oh, I loved it!

How did you get away? How did you get away from them?

I'm not telling you that...that's me!

Secret? That's me! Absolutely.

There must have been people wagging tongues, saying that you

were his mistress and, you know, it was a sexual relationship.

They didn't know any better.

They didn't know our language. We were not talking that way.

We had better things to think about.

"You just missed a sunrise," or, "You missed the lighting."

"Did you see the beautiful moon last night?"

Nature has all the answers.

They couldn't follow us. It wasn't a sexual relationship?

It has nothing to do with it.

Whatever was personal, what's that got to do with the painting

if you are sitting and trying to get a certain...

tone, for instance?

You know how many times you have to try?

And do you know there is magic in the brush?

You think he wanted anybody to watch them paint?

I put it right on the line and that's about it.

There were many people who knocked on our doors and, "Can I go

"out painting with you?" or, "Can I watch you paint?"

Certainly not.

Any more than I would have you watch me making love.

No!

The nude is the most holy thing that you can get next to it -

a divine spirit.

The soul, he paints the soul.

Wyeth's younger son, Jamie, now has his permanent home in Maine,

on Southern Island, a short boat ride from Tennant's Harbor.

Carrying on the family tradition, Jamie Wyeth, like his father Andrew

and his grandfather NC, is a respected painter in his own right.

'Whilst his painting has its own distinct style,

'his father's work ethic has certainly rubbed off on him.'

Fantastic!

'Jamie is clearly a man who works hard at his art.'

Good to see you again. Welcome to Southern Island.

Thank you, thank you. Wrong way up.

Thanks for sending the boat.

That's the studio but I paint in the bathroom,

I paint in the trees, I like not having a real studio.

Just what takes your fancy on that particular day.

Yes, exactly...absolutely.

'Island life became a sanctuary for the family after

'the furore of the Helga scandal.'

What was the reaction from the family

when the Helga paintings were revealed?

Erm... Or rather, what was the effect on the family?

Well, I mean, it's a remarkable body of work.

I think the first reaction was,

"My God!" I mean, he produced this huge amount of work

and also produced all other things at the time and all kept secret.

And was your mother's immediate reaction one of shock?

Well, her first reaction was amazing that this body of work...

and then obviously she felt,

"How could he have done this without my knowledge?"

I mean, she had been a real partner of he and his life and work.

And of course, you couldn't get more diametric opposites than

Betsy Wyeth and Helga Testorf.

A little picture of both.

It was really a perfect portrait of my father.

I mean, he would go from his house with my mother and that house

was devoid of flowers, devoid of any artifice and whatnot.

It's just the paintings on the wall, very subtle and then he would travel

to his studios, which was Helga's domain, which was complete chaos.

Food stacked up, magazines, books, tunnels through.

Really, the two sides of my father's personality.

Yeah.

And I don't think he really had a love affair with Helga,

it wasn't any of that.

It was just...he was obsessed with her fingernails, her elbow,

her pubic hair, whatever!

He was just obsessed with getting her on paper and paint.

The relationship, then, between your mother and Helga,

I imagine was a slightly awkward area? Yes.

But I think, you know, to me, the Helga thing was

a combination of his interest in Karl Kuerner, Germans,

that part of Chadds Ford, where they lived, the whole...

A lot of things rolled into that.

And then the big secret, the fact that he was able to work on these

things without people knowing about it.

So why he ended up living on an island, why was that?

Because my mother, his wife, chose to live on an island.

She wanted to create this world and he didn't want it.

So an island person he was not. Why did she like it?

She loved the control.

She loved the fact of being surrounded by water

and she could control who was seen and what was going on and so forth.

It fit right in to her modus operandi. OK.

Cheers again. Good to see you. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Safe travels.

It seems pretty clear to me

that Andy was a free spirit who could never be tied down.

After the Helga scandal was all over,

he continued to see his muse, now no longer a secret.

Helga was often by his side while he painted,

both during his summers in Maine

and when the summer was over back in Chadds Ford.

Although Andrew had painted his home town for most of his life,

he continued to find new subjects, even in his later years.

In the 1990s, he transferred his attentions to local couple

George and Helen Sipala.

GENTLE SNORING

He virtually took up residence in their home,

becoming almost part of the furniture.

He wanted to get as up close and personal as was humanly possible,

recording in painting every detail of their daily routine.

HE SNORES

ALARM BEEPS

HE GROANS

'He knew where the key was, he knew how to get in

'and he came when he wanted to.'

So you didn't feel it was kind of like an intrusion?

No. No.

No, when he caught us in bed, that was a little embarrassing.

Caught you in bed?

He would come in maybe six o'clock

and once he knew where the key was, he would sneak in.

He loved to sneak in on us. He loved to tiptoe up the stairs.

And he would go down the hall and the first few times he would

stand by the bed and for some reason I would wake up and I would scream

because he would be standing over me.

And after a while we started catching on

and we listened for the car and then we started playing jokes on him.

He always expected us to be in the bed,

which we stayed in but sometimes we put the wigs on ourselves...

Yeah. ..mannequins inside on the pillow,

like they were sleeping, and we would step into the next room

and look through the cracks of the door.

And watch him coming in on his... tiptoeing ever so lightly.

Then he would go and pick up the bedspread and from the backroom,

we'd be saying, "Gotcha! Gotcha!"

We did terrible things to him. Terrible things. But he loved it.

Doesn't sound very restful, your mornings. No.

"What are we going to do today?" He met his match when he came here.

For all those years he painted, I would have to call my boss and say,

"I'll be a little late today."

Andy had no concept of time, of my job.

He would start painting and if I had to leave, he would get very upset.

He was very possessive of his...

He really was.

It was a hideaway for him.

When he wanted to get away from... Anybody.

..the news people, visitors, company of any kind, this was a hideaway.

His wife?

I think everybody wants to get away from their wives once in a while.

I'm not going to say anything!

Everybody wants to get away from their husband once in a while, too.

MUSIC: "Joy To The World" by Isaac Watts

And he made a point of having Christmas with the Sipalas.

In the last 20 years of his life,

he spent virtually every Christmas Day with them.

I said, "Andy, we're going to have you over for a Christmas party."

He said, "I'm going to tell you now, Betsy won't come."

So George wrote Betsy a letter and said, in effect,

in the nicest of words, that "we will miss you

"and you will be very comfortable here and blah-blah-blah".

Down the line, the whole letter. And at the very end...

I told her to get her ass over here! In those words!

I understand that her secretary said,

"How can anybody talk to you like that?" But she came! She came!

She came! Yes, that got her. That got her.

We went to the door and there she was.

Hello! Welcome! Welcome to the Sipalas! Come on in!

'When people gave him Christmas presents, it would be coats and boots

and shoes and he would have to run right over to show us

what he got, cos I would have to say, "Wait a minute, Andy.

"I have to get a picture of this. I have to get a picture."

And that's how we preserved this, or else he would never pose.

It's like he's getting this portrait of a reclusive exhibitionist.

That's right. That's right.

His new outfit. You're right. Look what we have on!

Sweaters... He looks like the King of Denmark, dropping in. He does!

Christmas 2008 would be Andy's last with the Sipalas.

He died just a few weeks later, at the ripe old age of 91.

Helen Sipala sent her condolences to his widow, Betsy.

"Dear Betsy and family.

"We are thinking of you during this very difficult time.

"We send our love, thoughts, prayers.

"George and I have lost a dear and loyal friend in Andy.

"20 years ago he entered our lives and never left.

"So many memories, so much joy and a real honour to know him.

"We will miss him dearly, especially at Christmas.

"This past Christmas "he stopped in during the morning

"and had his last cup of tea with us. It was touching. Love, Helen."

So... Then he was gone.

The morning after Wyeth's death, Betsy turned to the family

that had made her husband famous all those years earlier.

Out of the blue John Olson, nephew of Andrew's muse Christina,

received a call enquiring about the family graveyard.

'The morning he died, Betsy called me'

and she said, "I want you to know that Andy has passed away

"and you are the first to know it."

Were you surprised that he wanted to be buried

alongside Christina in the family plot? Yes, I was.

She said, "Well," she said,

"She made us famous so I feel we ought to be buried there."

So I went ahead with it.

The grave-digger came down to the house,

knocked on the door and he said,

"Where are you putting Andy?"

I said, "What do you mean, where am I putting Andy?"

He said, "I guess you're the one that's got to pick out his grave."

So I had to go up to the cemetery...

..and find a spot where to bury him.

Was that a difficult thing to choose?

Well, I walked around and I said,

"What do you do with a famous man?" Yeah.

I mean, I'm not a famous person by no means.

I'm just a common, everyday person around here.

So I picked out the spot where he is buried.

OK. So now it's ready. Baited up.

Wow! Heavy stuff. Just watch it.

Wow! Yeah, yeah, yeah. OK. Here we go. OK.

God bless her and all that go down with her.

And here we have Anna Christina's grave and her brother, Alvaro. Yeah.

And Christina's parents. It is a modest little cemetery, isn't it?

It is. It's just a few families. Yeah.

And here we have Andrew Wyeth's grave. Yeah. That's Andrew's.

This is the newest grave in the cemetery. A simple stone.

Very simple. Just name and date.

No other information. Hmm.

Yeah. The most recent grave. The most recent grave.

ANDREW: There is almost nothing here which I like.

I think I'm more attracted, as I get older, by nothing.

Vacancy.

Light on the side of the wall or light on snowdrifts

and their shadows across them.

Makes me go back more into my...

..soul, I guess.

But you have to say that for the right moment,

it is like building up your urge for sex.

If you let it peter out all the time, it's no good

but if you build it up for the right moment, it's terrific.

And I find that's true with painting.

I mean, you could be going along, I can be going along and think,

"This is all vacant."

And then I'll see a piece of barbed wire against the snow,

rusted barbed wire with maybe a piece

of a horse's mane caught in it.

And that rusty barbed wire and that horse's mane, hair...

..it can just go to you and get you going.

After a life dedicated to art,

it seems right that Andrew Wyeth's final resting place

is almost at the spot where he painted Christina

in front of her family home.

It seemed a gesture typical of the man that even in death

he wanted to be with the people whose ordinary lives

and hard struggles he depicted for so long.

The more I've learned about Andrew Wyeth,

the more intriguing I find him -

a brilliant technician and a man of mischief, a playful prankster,

disciplined enough to paint on almost every single

day of his working life.

An artist who created a unique world, Wyeth's world,

by capturing time and time again the universal in his own back yard.