farm that Wyeth met Testorf, a German emigre who cleaned and cooked for Kuerner.

"I could not get out of my mind the image of this Prussian face with its broad jaw, wide-set eyes, blond hair," Wyeth said.

Wyeth painted Testorf from 1970 to 1985, but said didn't show his wife any of the pictures until 1981. In 1985, he revealed the full series to her, and declared he wanted them sold. The buyer, Leonard Andrews, reportedly paid $6 million to $10 million for them.

The Helga paintings created a sensation when their existence was revealed in 1986, in part because many were nudes and because of Betsy Wyeth's provocative answer when asked what the works were about. "Love," she said.

"He's a very secret person. He doesn't pry in my life and I don't pry in his. And it's worth it," she said.

After 1985, Wyeth painted Testorf at least three more times.

The exhibition of the Helga paintings at the National Gallery of Art in Washington drew tens of thousands, but it renewed the dispute between Wyeth's admirers and his equally passionate detractors.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York pointedly refused to accept the exhibition. And it turned out that the original stories about the collection overstated things, since some of the Helga paintings had been exhibited earlier and Betsy Wyeth had been aware of some of them.

Andrews sold the Helga collection in 1990 to a Japanese industrialist for some "40 to 50 million dollars," dealer Warren Adelson said in 2006, when he was handling the private sale of some 200 of the works. Adelson didn't identify the industrialist.

"When people want to bring sex into these images, OK, let 'em," Wyeth was quoted in the catalog to an exhibition Adelson organized. "The heart of the Helga series is that I was trying to unlock my emotions in capturing her essence, in getting her humanity down."

Some critics dismissed Wyeth's art as that of a mere "regionalist." Art critic Hilton Kramer was even more direct, once saying, "In my opinion, he can't paint."

The late J. Carter Brown, who was for many years director of the National Gallery, called such talk "a knee-jerk reaction among intellectuals in this country that if it's popular, it can't be good."

"I think the man's mastery of a variety of techniques is dazzling, and I think the content is in many cases moving," Brown said.

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Associated Press Writer JoAnn Loviglio contributed to this report.