Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009)
Knapsack
signed 'Andrew Wyeth' (lower left) and signed again faintly (lower right)
watercolor and pencil on paper
21 3/8 x 29 7/8 in. (54.3 x 75.9 cm.)
Executed in 1978.
Footnotes:
Provenance
Leonard E.B. Andrews (1925-2009), Malvern, Pennsylvania, acquired from the artist, April 1, 1986.
Private collection, Shibuya, Tokyo, Japan, 1989.
Pacific Sun Trading Company, Wellesley, Massachusetts, December 2005.
Private collection, Southampton, New York, July 2008.
Acquired by the present owner from the above, 2017.

Exhibited
Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art, Andrew Wyeth: The Helga Pictures, May 24-September 27, 1987, pp. 11, 19, 28, 30, 166, 199, 208, no. 203, illustrated, and elsewhere.
Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, Brandywine Museum of Art, The Helga Pictures: Then and Now, September 24-November 22, 1992, and elsewhere.
West Palm Beach, Florida, Norton Museum of Art, Andrew Wyeth-The Helga Pictures, January 13-March 24, 1996, and elsewhere.
Louisville, Kentucky, J.B. Speed Art Museum, Wyeth: Three Generations, June 2-August 16, 1998.
Lafayette, Louisiana, The Hilliard Art Museum, University of Louisiana, Andrew Wyeth's Helga Pictures, April 21-July 21, 2004, pp. 84, 97, no. 61, illustrated, and elsewhere.
Naples, Florida, Naples Museum of Art, Andrew Wyeth & Family, January 21-May 14, 2006.
New York, Adelson Galleries, Inc., Andrew Wyeth: Helga on Paper, November 3-December 22, 2006, pp. 17, 110-11, 126, no. 75, illustrated.
San Francisco, San Francisco Fine Art Fair, May 21-23, 2010.
Santa Fe, Gerald Peters Gallery, Three Generations of Wyeth, July 3-August 3, 2010.
Greenwich, Connecticut, Art Greenwich, September 20-23, 2012.
New York, Gerald Peters Gallery, Andrew Wyeth, October 4-November 2, 2012.
Santa Barbara, California, Sullivan Goss, Andrew Wyeth: American Master, May 2-June 30, 2013.
Denver, Goodwin Fine Art, Andrew Wyeth: A Survey, October 30-November 20, 2015.

Literature
Andrew Wyeth: The Helga Pictures, calendar, 1988, illustrated.
The Mint Museum, Andrew Wyeth: The Helga Pictures, invitation, Charlotte, North Carolina, 2004, illustrated.
D. Shinn, 'Helga,' Akron Beacon Journal, Akron, Ohio, August 8, 2004, illustrated.
K. Shulman, 'An Ever Mysterious Muse,' Art & Antiques, Wilmington, North Carolina, October 2006, illustrated.
C. Quillman, 'Andrew Wyeth: Helga on Paper,' Antiques & Fine Art, Woburn, Massachusetts, October 2006, illustrated.
'Andrew Wyeth's 'Helga Series' at Adelson Galleries Nov. 3,' Antiques & The Arts Weekly, Newtown, Connecticut, October 27, 2006, p. 25, illustrated.
J. Woodard, 'A Slice of Wyeth's World,' Santa Barbara News-Press, Santa Barbara, California, May 17, 2013, S47, illustrated.
J.D. Balestrieri, 'Painting Windows and a Family Affair,' American Fine Art Magazine, New York, May-June 2014, pp. 48-55, illustrated.

The Andrew & Betsy Wyeth Study Center of the Brandywine Museum of Art confirms that this object is recorded in Betsy James Wyeth's files.

The copyright to this work is reserved by © Pacific Sun Trading Company, courtesy of Frank E. Fowler and Warren Adelson.

Andrew Wyeth's Knapsack executed in 1978 is arguably the most alluring and refined preparatory study the artist produced for his finished painting of the same title. Knapsack is a pivotal work in the development of his famed Helga Pictures, a series that depicts his favored model, Helga Testorf and is a deeply contemplative image. Though Wyeth purposefully infuses a passionate affection for Helga into each image of her, he maintained that depicting her charged beauty was not his primary intent. Instead, commenting to Thomas Hoving (1931-2009), 'The heart of the Helga series is that I was trying to unlock my emotions in capturing her essence, in getting her humanity down.' (as quoted in T. Hoving, Andrew Wyeth: Helga on Paper, exhibition catalogue, New York, 2006, p. 15) In Knapsack, Wyeth paints two of his beloved subjects treated with equal importance—Helga and the union of the individual with the surrounding landscape. As much as Wyeth admired Helga's beauty, he also had a lifelong fascination with the relationship between the single figure absorbed in a suspended, introspective moment and the natural world, specifically the fields and woodlands familiar to both him and his models.

The Helga Pictures began in 1970 when Wyeth met Helga 'Testy' Testorf, their neighbor in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania for the first time. Born in Germany, Helga met John Testorf, also a native to Germany and a naturalized U.S. citizen, in 1957 and the two wed a year later. By 1961, Helga and John were living in Philadelphia, where Helga worked for a tannery, but the couple soon moved to Chadds Ford where they would live a quiet life raising a family. Helga eventually took a position serving as caretaker to the elderly Karl Kuerner, another model and friend of Wyeth. In 1970, Wyeth was in the process of painting an image of Karl and Anna Kuerner's home and while doing so, he saw Helga for the first time. The following year, Wyeth asked Helga to model for him, marking the beginning of an extensive artist-model relationship. Forever known as 'The Helga Pictures,' Wyeth produced over 240 works from 1971 to 1987 done in tempera, drybrush, watercolor, and pencil portraying Helga, many of which including the present work depict her standing or seated in a landscape clothed and seen from behind.

When Wyeth spoke to Hoving about the series, he recounted, 'One day in 1971 I met Helga at the Kuerners'. She was married to Johnny Testorf who supervised the local gardens [Longwood Gardens] and was a friend of the Kuerners. She'd come over and help them in their chores...I was entranced the instant I saw her. I thought she was the personification of all young Prussian girls and she possessed all the qualities of the Kuerner girls. Amazingly blond, fit, compassionate. I was totally fascinated by her. God, I thought, I have to have her as my next model! The difference between me and a lot of painters is that I have to have a personal contact with my models. I don't mean sexual love, I mean real love. Many artists tell me they don't even recall the names of their models. I have to fall in love with mine—hell, I do much the same with a tree or a dog. I have to become enamored, smitten. That's what happened when I saw Helga walking up the Kuerners' lane. She was the amazing, crushing blond.' (as quoted in Andrew Wyeth: Helga on Paper, pp. 12-13)

In Knapsack, Wyeth depicts Helga seated on a hillside with her back turned toward the viewer gazing toward the wooded landscape before her. Identifiable by her distinctive blond braids, Helga is dressed in a blue overcoat contrasted by the autumnal browns, greens, and grays of the trees and sky overhead. In the final version of Knapsack, Wyeth frames the work closer on Helga's image by removing both the rocks that jut out from the hillside and the slight suggestion of a body of water visible at far left in the present work. Wyeth also intensifies the blues of her overcoat and deepens the grays, greens, and blacks, resulting in a greater contrast of her image against the surrounding landscape and further emphasizes her position as the focal point. In the final version, Wyeth also adds a layer of complexity to her deceptively relaxed pose, as he depicts her with one arm on her lap and another stretched behind her with her fingers planted on the ground, appearing strangely alert. Lastly, a brown bag or knapsack resting on the hillside is visible to Helga's left in the final version and is where the title for the work likely originates. In Knapsack, Wyeth successfully captures Helga's essence using these stylistic techniques and gives uniform attention to the beauty of both Helga and the natural elements of the surrounding landscape.

The final image of Knapsack is reminiscent of the emotion and isolation felt in Christina's World (1948, The Museum of Modern Art, New York), arguably Wyeth's most celebrated painting. In Christina's World, Wyeth depicts a young woman, Anna Christina Olson (1893-1968) lying on a dry, grassy field in an alert position with her back turned toward the viewer and wearing a pink dress that is contrasted deeply against her overcast surroundings. By comparison to Knapsack, however, Wyeth leaves a greater sense of place in his image of Christina and encourages equal inspection of the buildings and their highly detailed features that are significant to Christina's limited, but beautiful world that she has conquered despite her degenerative physical condition. Whereas Christina's World can arguably be mapped as a psychological landscape portraying the state of mind of Christina as she approaches the challenges of a physically limited life, Knapsack can be seen as a psychological portrait of Helga fixed in isolation that reflects the artist's own emotional response to both her beauty and the familiar natural world that populates both his memories and dreams.

As is the case in many of Wyeth's figural works, the influence of Edward Hopper's (1882-1967) philosophies of observation and unembellished recording of the physical world is evident in the design of Knapsack. Wyeth admired Hopper's mastery of light, plain designs, and the isolation of his subjects to emphasize their loneliness in the modern world. Anne Classen Knutson astutely wrote, 'Wyeth's imagery may have been inspired by Edward Hopper's voyeuristic views of lone figures lost in thought or seen through or beside windows. Hopper is one of the few artists whose influence Wyeth acknowledges. Both gravitated to old houses and empty interiors, and both created frozen, haunted settings with a sense of suspended drama and nostalgia.' (A.C. Knutson, Andrew Wyeth: Memory & Magic, exhibition catalogue, Atlanta, 2005, p. 76) An excellent example of this is seen in Hopper's Room in Brooklyn (1932, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) that depicts a young woman clothed and seated in a chair with her back turned toward the viewer staring pensively out a window into the distance.

Wyeth, like Hopper, achieved success in creating images constructed on distant narratives that evoked a haunting solitude. In Knapsack, Wyeth psychologically involves himself in the composition on a profound level while simultaneously maintaining a detachment from Helga, to masterfully create an image characterized by its intimate narrative, acute tension, and tantalizing sense of anticipation. Though Wyeth's feelings for Helga were strong, he always maintained a level of detachment from his models and appreciated invention and imagination alongside the realist principles of interpretation. Richard Meryman astutely wrote of the detached dynamic Wyeth maintained with his various models, noting 'There was a kind of comfort for Betsy in her view that Wyeth's relationship with all models is ultimately detached and temporary. As she once explained, 'When Andy is going to begin a tempera, he sees a total play, a total situation. It's as though he's creating the role of Hamlet from first to last on the panel...he's becoming what he paints, the intangibles. He is the person.'' (R. Meryman, Andrew Wyeth: A Secret Life, p. 311) Meryman's remarks align with the mentality of Hopper, who at periods imagined and inhabited the figure in his interiors disconnected from themselves and their environment to perfectly conjure the loneliness and isolation he seeks to portray—a defining image of twentieth-century life.

Knapsack remains a crown achievement in Wyeth's oeuvre of depicting single figures absorbed in a suspended moment in the natural world. Through Helga's isolation from the world depicted in Knapsack, Wyeth is able to successfully capture and direct focus to her essence and her relationship with her familiar surroundings. As Donald Kuspit noted in the exhibition catalogue, Andrew Wyeth's Helga Pictures, 'She is a consummate symbol of the contradictory nature of the human condition—the tension and difference between body and soul—which from the beginning of his career was Wyeth's theme.' (D. Kuspit, Andrew Wyeth's Helga Pictures, Washington, D.C., 2004, p. 9) The present work is unique in that it provides a fascinating revelation into Wyeth's artistic process for the finished version, demonstrating both his heightened ability to formulate dramatic tensions between light and shadow and the careful decisions he made for Helga's position in nature to achieve the most thought-provoking image of her.
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