<i> Andrew Wyeth: The Helga Pictures text by John Wilmerding; forewords by J. Carter Brown and Leonard E.B. Andrews (Abrams: $40; 208 pp., illustrated) </i>

Last August, Andrew Wyeth dropped a bombshell on the artistic community when he revealed a body of more than 240 previously unknown works. Done over a span of 15 years, they formed a counterpoint of moody portraits and nudes of a robust blond woman known only as “Helga.” Their sole purchaser, Texas millionaire Leonard Andres, quickly arranged a major traveling exhibition with the National Gallery, and these pictures now appear to have been entered into the official canon of American masterpieces. Their promotion is completed with Harry N. Abrams’ lavish publication of “Andrew Wyeth: The Helga Pictures,” containing an introductory essay by John Wilmerding, deputy director of the National Gallery.

It must be stated up front that, whatever one thinks of either Wyeth or the Helga “Suite,” as it is labeled, this is an extremely handsome book. The text is informative, if biased, and the plates are superb, organized to show the ebb and flow of the artist’s concerns and imagination. The paintings are presented along with their preparatory sketches, as an intimate view into the techniques and processes of Wyeth’s art.

However, the book cannot be separated from the media event. It is a commentary on the latter as much as the quality of the former that this is the first art book ever made a Book of the Month Club main selection. The story of Wyeth’s secret cache made the covers of Time and Newsweek as well as Art & Antiques, which claimed the scoop. Wyeth’s wife, Betsy, was said to have been largely unaware of the paintings’ existence--or of the identity of the model, who turned out to be a shy German immigrant working for Wyeth’s relatives. When asked what she thought the works were about, Betsy Wyeth answered “love,” and touched off a minor storm of media titillation. The artist’s possible “involvement” with his model was discussed more with sly winks than stern condemnation; it was even suggested that the Wyeths had promoted such speculations in order to gain publicity. Whether or not this is true, the Helga paintings have gotten more press, both good and bad, than almost any other recent event in American art.

Now, an artist painting a nude model is hardly front-page news, even when the artist is famous. And these were not even Wyeth’s first nudes--in 1969, two years before he met Helga, Wyeth had painted Siri Erickson, a 14-year-old neighbor girl, pictures that he withheld until the girl was of legal age. On the popular level, what made the Helga paintings different was that the story had spice; here was America’s favorite homespun painter, known more for old barns than creamy thighs, involved for 15 years with a mystery woman. Betsy’s suggestive comment increased the speculations.

On the critical level, the paintings reopened an old dispute. Wyeth is an artist many critics have long loved to hate; when abstract expressionism replaced regionalism as the “triumph of American art,” Wyeth went his own way. He ignored the New York scene, never traveled much--his very popularity seemed evidence of his vulgarity. Even with the advent of the “new realism,” Wyeth still seems out of place, lost in his own world. He is “at once the most overestimated painter by the knowing art audience,” according to Prof. Robert Rosenblum of New York University.

The critical community itself is deeply divided. Hilton Kramer of the New Criterion condemns Wyeth’s work: “It’s provincial, it’s sentimental, it’s illustration and it’s without substance.” On the other hand, Wilmerding with characteristic enthusiasm has placed himself firmly among the believers. He declares that Wyeth is “along with Hopper . . . one of the two greatest American realists in the 20th Century.”

A recognized expert in American realism, Wilmerding eruditely attempts to place the Helga paintings in the great tradition of the nude. He traces the line of Wyeth’s predecessors to not only the obvious masters such as Duerer, Rembrandt, and Manet, but to such forgotten American luminaries as John Vanderlyn and George de Forest Brush. And, of course, Wyeth is examined in relation to those two 19th-Century standards, Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins, as well as to his own father N. C. Wyeth.

Wilmerding also briefly examines the Helga paintings within the context of the artist’s other work, which for several decades largely centered around his neighbors in Pennsylvania and Maine, especially the Kuerners and the Olsons. Over the years, he painted their weathered, Nordic faces as they aged like old wood. Following the lead of previous writers. Wilmerding sees in these ‘painting cycles’ a purpose deeper than mere portraiture of genre. Wyeth hinted that “there’s witchcraft and hidden meaning in there”; the paintings themselves were built “in great layers, the way the great earth itself was built.” His neighbors, their houses and fields, all became characters in a kind of chthonic mythology.

As his friends grew old and died, Wyeth sought rejuvenation. In young Siri Erickson, the daughter of a 73-year-old neighbor, he had found another kind of Earth deity, an innocent Persephone. His best painting of her, standing nude in a dark barn, is titled “The Virgin.” Helga Testorf, however, was 38 when they met, a mature, full bodied mother. Wilmerding tells us she represented the next step, “a mature capacity for procreativity.” The implication is that this applied both to model and artist: Here, despite the illness and increasing loneliness of Wyeth’s advancing years, were his best paintings, the work of an American master.

Who to believe? Are the paintings, as Wilmerding claims, “among the most powerful images of the human figure in the history of 20th-Century painting”--or are they merely sensational, another inconsequential media blip? The argument, really, is not about the Helga paintings. It is the same old thing--is Wyeth any good, or isn’t he? Wilmerding shows us that these pictures do not exist in splendid isolation, but having taken sides, he does not really go to the heart of this central question. It is useful, therefore, to examine this ‘Wyeth problem’ for a moment independently of his essay, or of the Helga Suite itself.

A good place to begin is with Wyeth’s most famous painting, “Christina’s World,” a tightly controlled tempera. Christina Olson--a neighbor, and one of Wyeth’s favorite models--is commonly misconceived as a young girl sitting prettily in a field, her back to us as she gazes nostalgically at a large house up on the hill. What could be more saccharine? But on closer examination, we see that the arms are gnarled, the pose uncomfortable; the figure floats like a cut-out against a harshly flattened landscape without depth or horizon. It is a picture out of joint, a bucolic platitude gone awry, and so it comes as less of a surprise to learn that in fact Christina was homely, a middle-aged paraplegic who eschewed wheelchairs, preferring to drag herself along the hard New England ground with her arms.

Wyeth’s dilemma, really, is that he is in conflict with his first source of inspiration, his father. N. C. Wyeth was an illustrator of adventure tales, who used stagy composition and lighting to achieve dramatic effects. His son Andrew’s first natural tendency is to delineate and romanticize, whether objects or faces. His goal, however, is something other, and it is this tension that produces the unusual energy in his work. The quaint springtime scenes of Rockwell’s New England wither into harshest winter. For all the fact that he often works with a microscopic care reminiscent of the German and Flemish old masters, Wyeth “honestly considers (himself) an abstractionist.” His bleak panoramas and interiors often have more in common formally with the work of Robert Motherwell or Franz Kline than with that of other realists. Detesting what he calls “the visual cocktail” offered by so many representational painters, Wyeth works with an earthy palette and often sabotages his own intricate technique with “accidental,” impulsive splashes of color. He is an artist of extremes working within tightly circumscribed boundaries, probing sometimes incoherently after the mystery of familiar objects and people. When his conflicting tendencies are resolved in a successful image the result can be startling, almost magical, but when they do not, it is awful. He has been mediocre not because his work is even-handedly pedestrian, but because it has been so uneven. It seems that artist himself has little control over which way the work will turn out. This may account for the very significant differences of opinion about an art which is so deceptively “obvious.”

All of this applies to the Helga pictures. Their unveiling and publication, as carefully controlled as his best temperas, seem designed to assure Wyeth of his place in art history. The book’s gorgeous layout and laudatory essays tell us we are being admitted to an unprecedented treasure-trove of masterpieces. Unfortunately, even with this seductive presentation, in the final analysis the Helga pictures betray Wyeth’s characteristic inconsistency. Not all of the paintings succeed--some are clumsy, or ill-proportioned, or cliched. A few problems are unusual. Wyeth is often admired for his drawings, and yet here the many preliminary sketches and finished pencil studies are curiously tentative, even inept, displaying errors in execution more appropriate to the efforts of a student.

However, critical hoopla and invective aside, some of these paintings are indeed superb, containing flashes of real brilliance. The publisher has been generous with detail shots revealing gemlike passages of texture and color, moments of great subtlety. Again, when Wyeth succeeds the result is powerful. Perhaps he is not up to Rembrandt, Duerer or Manet, but then who is? Certainly no one painting today. Rosenblum says, “I think he’s a creator of very, very haunting images that nobody who hates him can get out of their minds.” Some of the Helga images are well worth looking at, and the book lets one look. It reveals the very private meditations of a very private man, an artist of considerable complexity struggling to push reality from the banal into the mythic.