![]() Long after the flap died down, facts slowly began to emerge. Within days, newspapers and television broadcasts from coast to coast were reporting on an artist who is supposedly a national treasure who may or may not have been sleeping with his model who was a woman who was completely unknown to the national treasure’s wife who was also his business manager but who was unaware that her husband/client had for 15 years been painting pictures of her sister’s housekeeper. That’s the silly season - or, as White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card famously put it in 2003, “From a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August.” Apparently they were starved for something, anything in the way of beach-reading during the dog days of August. (I got one.) No one bit - except the two news weeklies. Art & Antiques magazine, which was peddling an “exclusive’ shocker about Wyeth in its September 1986 issue, by way of summer press releases sent to numerous news outlets. ![]() The pseudo-scandal - and it was pseudo - was ginned up by. ![]() ![]() He “rocked” the art world the way one rocks the cradle of a near-helpless infant. I remember Andrews as a savvy participant in one of the great media hoaxes about art in the last quarter-century. But I remember the tabloid story somewhat differently. ![]()
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