The circumstances surrounding the revelation of Andrew Wyeth's Helga pictures have by now been well recorded. Astonishment and curiosity, in the art world and at large, greeted the news that this major American artist had for fifteen years been working in virtual secrecy on a substantial new series: more than 240 works centering around one model, Helga Testorf, a neighbor of the Wyeths in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. Speculation abounded concerning the model, and intense publicity was focused on Leonard E. B. Andrews, the publisher, collector, and philanthropist who purchased the works with the intention of preserving them as national treasures. Amid the tumult, only a few were privileged to view the Helga paintings and drawings themselves; only they experienced the strong, luminous power of Wyeth's work, which shines out like a beacon in this storm of controversy. Andrew Wyeth: The Helga Pictures presents to the public for the first and only time every work in the series - from a small, closely observed sketch of Helga's eye, through numerous lush studies of Helga asleep, to rich, highly polished drybrushes and temperas. Abundantly clear on page after page is that the Wyeth-Helga collaboration is unique in American art - and has few parallels elsewhere. For a decade and a half, Wyeth chronicled this one woman with passionate intensity and artistry. She appears in all moods and all seasons - wrapped in sheepskin, crowned with wildflowers, lying among autumn leaves; she undergoes the physical changes the years make. And, over and over, there are rare glimpses into Wyeth's working methods as finished works emerge from studies marked with flashes of artistic intuition. In more than 10o colorplates and 160 black and whites, Helga takes her place among those few models, like Rembrandt's Saskia and Picasso's Dora Maar, who were transformed by artistic genius into symbols of all women.