The Making of a Scoop

By Richard Zoglin

Like most reporters who have snared a tough interview, Jeffrey Schaire came armed and ready for his one-on-one session with Andrew Wyeth. He had boned up on the artist's work and even recalled verses from Emily Dickinson in an effort to prod his reclusive subject. But nothing could have prepared the journalist for Wyeth's startling disclosure. Midway through the 90-minute interview, after a moment of thought, Wyeth said matter-of-factly, "There's a whole vast amount of my work no one knows about. Not even my wife."

That quiet revelation -- quoted in the September 1985 issue of Art & Antiques magazine -- triggered a chain of events that led to last week's shellburst of interest in the artist's secret Helga collection. As the art community focused its attention on Wyeth and his mystery model, the spotlight was shared by the magazine that first got on to the story. TV crews and reporters swarmed over its modest, fifth-floor headquarters on Manhattan's lower Fifth Avenue. The rush of phone calls was so overwhelming at one point that the lights on the switchboard simply conked out.

What Schaire proudly describes as the "little magazine that could" was born in 1978, but took its current form in 1984, after it was purchased by Texas Publisher Wick Allison. He set out to create an art magazine that would appeal not just to art insiders but to the general public as well. With its glossy new look, Art & Antiques has seen its circulation jump from 23,000 to 98,000. Still, seat-of-the-pants remains the typical mode of operation. The bare-bones staff of 27 routinely works a seven-day week, and sometimes even dresses up in period costume to pose for photo layouts.

With well-known contributors like William F. Buckley and Joyce Carol Oates, Art & Antiques has gained a reputation for provocative reporting. One article last year raised questions (still unresolved) about the authenticity of the Antioch chalice, purchased by New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art and purported to have been used by Jesus at the Last Supper. A few months ago, a man speaking broken English wandered into the magazine's offices. He turned out to be carrying slides smuggled out of the Soviet Union showing works from the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts never before seen in the West.

Landing the Wyeth interview was "pure dumb luck," says Schaire, 32, the magazine's energetic executive editor, whose first art job was driving a forklift for the Metropolitan Museum's gift-shop warehouse. He requested the interview by letter in November 1984 (enclosing a copy of the magazine with a cover story on, coincidentally, "Winslow Homer's Mystery Woman"). Six months later a Wyeth intermediary replied that the publicity-shy artist would agree to talk.

Wyeth's disclosure, tucked unobtrusively into the fourth paragraph of the magazine's story, created hardly a ripple. It was exactly a year, and the September 1986 issue of Art & Antiques, before the import of Wyeth's remarks became strikingly clear. The closing of the circle came last April, when Schaire was visiting Pennsylvania for another story and met with Peter Ralston, a photographer and friend of the Wyeths'. Ralston told him to get in the car, he had a "surprise" to show him. An hour later, Schaire was poring over the 240 works that are now the talk of the art world.

With reporting by John Moody/New York