Plans for what happens after Betsy dies to the thousands of works in her collection have not been unveiled. “When each of us who knew him pass away, it’s going to lose that character,” says Dorothy “Dee” Parker, a retired elementary school art teacher whom Wyeth painted.īut the process of transforming a living icon into a historical one is already well underway.Īt 92, Betsy Wyeth, who managed the business side of her husband’s career, has yielded that job to staffers in the Wyeth office, who helped organize the show opening May 4 at the National Gallery with guidance from the couple’s two sons. For many characters in the dramas that played out in these few square miles of suburbanizing Southeastern Pennsylvania still live nearby, including Helga and Wyeth’s wife of almost seven decades, Betsy. Waitresses and mechanics, friends and neighbors relive memories through bursts of affectionate laughter and sudden silences. There are stories about him flipping and rolling his snowmobile and fencing with friends in his studio about outings with buxom mannequins and a party with a headless skeleton about how he collected toy soldiers, ordered his burgers rare and had a hug like he wouldn’t let go.Īnd about how when he died, dozens of cameramen and reporters showed up where he ate at Hank’s Place, wanting to know what it was like when Andy (because he insisted on being called “Andy”) came in with his longtime model, Helga Testorf. The one about the evening he showed up, boyish-proud, at a friend’s dinner party, saying, “Look what I’ve got!” Out in the driveway sat a Stutz Bearcat - a celebrity sports car that he used to say he’d acquired in exchange for a painting. There’s the one about Wyeth painting a bonfire and picking up a piece of charred wood to take home to his studio, only to have it burst into flames in the back of his car. Five years after Andrew Wyeth’s death, stories about “America’s artist” still animate this little township at the intersection of Route 1 and the Brandywine River.
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