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In 1986, painter Andrew Wyeth let the tantalizing revelation slip.

Despite working on the series for more than 15 years, Wyeth had managed to keep more 240 pencil drawings, drybrush and conventional watercolors — and his apparent obsession with his Chadds Ford, Penn., neighbor, Helga Testorf — secret from everyone, including his wife Betsey.

The admission catapulted the so-called “Helga” paintings and Wyeth, loved by the public but widely disdained by the art elite, into a Page-Six-style boil as well as onto the covers of Time and Newsweek. Many wondered if such an apparently intimate and long-term liaison was sexual — a notion initially encouraged and then denied by Wyeth.

Over the ensuing years, he talked little about the work or his relationship with Helga. In 2002, though, he sat down to discuss the subject with friend Thomas Hoving. That previously unpublished interview is the be-and-end-all of the Naples Museum of Art’s newest publication, a limited edition monograph called “Wyeth on Helga.” It’s currently available at the museum store or through the Web site, www.thephil.org.

Hoving, who has written two books on Wyeth and was, for a time, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, gave the museum permission to print the interview after an appearance at the museum during “Andrew Wyeth & Family,” an exhibition devoted to the three-generation dynasty of American painters. The show was curated from collections all over the United States and featured more than 50 of the “Helga” paintings.

Which is, in itself, something of a coup for a museum of this size.

Hoving’s impromptu offer spawned a diminutive, 24-page book that is more Interview magazine than a traditional exhibition catalog. There are no scholarly essays, no rundown of the possibly iffy chain of events that lead a collector to pay $40 million for the group, no aesthetic deconstruction of specific works. In fact, the newest owner — an American collector who bought the group in December and is rumored to be considering breaking up the works for sale — would not allow more than one image to be reproduced here: the stark, pensive “Refuge” from 1985.

“Wyeth on Helga” serves a much less oblique mistress than most museum catalogs. Like postcard snippets of who-what-where-and-why, Wyeth simply remembers how it all happened.

On their first meeting: “I was entranced the instant I saw her. I thought she was the personification of all young Prussian girls ... God, I thought, I have to have her as my next model.”

On the secrecy: “I knew right away that I wanted this relationship — if it worked — to be a secret. Because I didn’t want anyone to know that I had fallen deeply in love.”

On the pressure of outside judgment: “I worked for 15 years without anyone but Helga seeing them. If anyone had said, ‘Andy, this is wonderful,’ that would have held me back. If someone had spotted one and told me, ‘That’s no good,’ that would have depressed me.”

At its best, “Wyeth on Helga” is a burrowing exploration into the all-too pedestrian process of the artist’s life — working, working, working toward no particular end, perhaps, but the working itself. Each location, each costume (or lack of one), each tilt of the head posed challenges that Wyeth ground under his tires and then rolled past.

His voice is unique and indelible as he unreels fascinating little monologues on the origin of titles, on the weather one day, on the benefits of drybrush. Perhaps more important, though, his ruminations carve out the contours of the painter-subject relationship, which was the lifeblood of his work throughout his career.

Helga, who started posing for Wyeth when she was 32, was present during the Hoving interview, and her comments appear, like precious pearls, in bold. They are simple reflections grounded in practical things — socks, a necklace, Wyeth’s chattering.

The most delicious and perhaps most telling occurs after Wyeth calls her mysterious and sad when discussing “Refuge.” “I’m always misread, all my life,” she says. And then, curiously: “This is one of my favorites.”

Unfortunately, the book’s rushed May 8 release date didn’t allow for the inevitable conversation between the words and the images as you wandered the galleries, book in hand. The show came down Sunday after a five-month run. And without images reproduced in the book, the reader is left to imagination, or to surfing the Web.

For better or worse, “Wyeth on Helga” documents more than just the backstory of these infamous works. Disconcertingly, Wyeth emerges as a man of some coarseness, mercurial sensitivity and pettiness who seems to regard his uncomplaining married subject not that differently than a junkyard dog sees a 40-ounce steak. It’s a revelation that for some Wyeth fans may be unwanted.

“Some months after finishing the tempera,” he writes of his first nude image of Helga, “I saw Johnny Testorf and I said, ‘I hope you don’t mind my painting Helga.’ He said it was fine, ‘but don’t ever paint her nude.’ Ha. I’d already painted her nude.”

It’s painter as man, I guess, and not always a very nice man at that.

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Reach Mobley-Martinez at tmmartinez@naplesnews.com.