This is the interior of the Maine farm house of "Alvaro and Christina" as painted by Andrew Wyeth shortly after the deaths of the Maine siblings who lived there, and part of a Wyeth exhibit on display at the Hyde Collection in Glens Falls until Sept. 5. (The sister was the subject of Wyeth's most famous work, "Christina's World," painted more than two decades previously. It is not part of the exhibit.) In the Aug. 30 New Yorker, Ian Frazier has an article about abandoned Siberian prison camps in which he says: "Ordinary physical objects are alive in Russia far more than they are in America." But the humble objects in that room do seem to take on life from their owners and painter. So do some beautiful white boards on a dairy farm in a small work, "Cooling Shed."
There are a few paintings of Helga Testorf, a married caretaker of a Pennsylvania neighbor who posed secretly for the married Wyeth in the 1970s and '80s. They include one of a series of nudes called "On Her Knees," which John Updike (no stranger to secret assignations) in his book of art essays "Just Looking" calls "an erotically charged pose." In this version, unlike some others, the face is included. What's happening below is not immediately obvious, but Helga does not seem happy about it.
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