Helga's Keeper

Leonard E.B. Andrews is the kind of journalist who, when Soviet thought controllers jail his peer Nicholas Daniloff on trumped up spy charges, fires off a cable to Moscow withdrawing his three Andrew Wyeths from the much ballyhooed three generations of of Wyeth exhibition. "It just seemed so unfair," he commented coolly from his office in Edgemont on the West Chester Pike. "I did what I had the power to do." To most of America, Andrews is the wealthy entrepreneur / philanthropist who made headlines last fall with a reputed $6 million purchase of a trove of Wyeth works about Helga, an enormous "hidden" cache that the artist had stashed over a 15-year period of creation in a barn loft.

But that's not the way Lenny Andrews wants to be known by what he calls "indigenous Americans." He'd much prefer they'd plug into his National Arts program, a visionary scheme to unlock the creative powers that he feels lie dormant in your everyday, run-of-the-mill American. He inaugurated the idealistic art exhibition program in Philadelphia in 1985 when over 700 municipal employees (police, fire, sanitation, what have you) showed off their creations in the Civic Center. This year he further deployed his idea for the artening of America in Hartford, Conn., Atlanta, Georgia, and San Antonio, Texas. He tapped the internationally renowned black painter Benny Andrews, who once headed the Visual Arts program of the National Endowment for the Arts, to help him make the program fully national in five years.

What makes Lenny run after the ordinary Americans he feels suffer from lack of exposure from the arts? Because he wants to acknowledge and inspire personal creativity. He feels that fostering personal standards of excellence through access to the arts and enriching the quality of life that results from striving for excellence will put a badly needed tone back into an America slipping behind in the race for international economic competition.

Art is not only needed for the bottom-line economic sector; it also encourages self-expression at a time "when many feel suppressed, dehumanized, by advancing technology." Paradoxically, then, we need everyone involved in the arts both to keep the technology edge in our competition with Japan, West Germany, and the other front runners; we need it as well to protect our own humanity.

Andrews is thrilled at the first fruits of his talent scout. He talks with pride about the burly policeman from Philly who entered a delicate wood sculpture of a ballet dance. And he talks with enthusiasm as well about a twelve-year-old seventh grader at Marlton, N.J. Middle School whose painting hung in the first Philadelphia NAP showing. That budding artist is now furthering his studies on a tuition grant at a South Jersey studio. Andrews now dreams of a National Museum of Indigenous American Art, a permanent home for the best stuff shown at a national network of NAP regional exhibitions. He hopes such a collection of the best would circulate to stimulate further populist activity in the arts.

He has been trying to sell the big museums on this concept since 1972. But they wanted no part of it, geared as they are to an elitist art that circulates in a narrow circuit further and further removed from the everyday lives of the great majority of the American people. So Andrews is the kind of guy who does it his way if "the proper authorities" won't cooperate.

It has been ever thus in his quirky, offbeat life as the entrepreneur who is intrepid to try what everybody else assumes is impossible. For example, the Negodoches, Texas-born banker was running a cred card operation in New York when all the dailies decided to go on strike. No ads, no widespread use of credit cards. What to do? He talked his sponsors into putting up a $50,000 kitty to start The New York Standard, a daily newspaper to fill the void, staffed by journalists from the temporarily defunct papers. Voila! Not only did he keep his credit card customers' places of business steadily before the eyes of the newspaper-junkie New York City public, but he cleared $500,000 profit to boot. Andrews is the kind of canny man who can turn other people's adversities to his own advantage.

He was lolling about in the Pyrenees in June 1970 when a story in the International Herald Tribune caught his eye: The Philadelphia-based Penn Central Transportation Co. had just gone belly up. Hmmm, he thought to himself, a lot of lawyers are going to need a lot of information to file their law suits on behalf of the creditors of the defunct railroad. How would they get it? He'd give it to them. And a new kind of medium was born--the litigation newsletter. It's a mini sort of medium--the best-selling of his 23 bimonthly litigation reports, the Asbestos Litigation Reporter, has fewer than "a couple thousand" subscribers.

But the price is maxi enough: for 24 issues of his Iranian Assets Litigation Reporter and two cumulative indexes, happy readers (the re-subscription rate for his mini-media is 95%!) shell out $2,000 a year. Most of the litigation newsletters are in the range of $700 a year. So with a full-time staff of 125 (40 in Edgemont), many reliable stringers (many lawyers, a few judges), and some trusty Xerox machines, he keeps a steady flow of crucial data flowing to his clients who depend on the specialized information to make their legal decisions. Thus does innovative business dealings give an off-beat idealist the money to buy great art and encourage the art impulse in the ordinary citizen.

He even syndicated a poetry/folk wisdom column originating from the New York Daily News for over a decade. Called Ponder This (he gathered a sheaf of the columns in a volume with this title), they featured pithy aphorisms such as, "What is the order of important things for the bride and groom? / Truth, respect, and joyous fulfillment." The 62-year-old original knows what access to the arts has done to his pioneering imaginativeness, and he won't be content until ordinary Americans share that power and insight.

And you'll never find him preening on Robin Leach's TV grosser, "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous." Despite his admission that he has profited handsomely form "some excellent investments in the stock market," he insists that he has always had a "very modest lifestyle." He still lives in the rented farmhouse near his office which he settled into in 1973 when his litigation reporter concept was just getting up to speed. Money is not something to shout about for Leonard Edward Bryant Andrews--it is rather quiet power that puts clout behind his dreams.

And you can bet your latest tort he won't be fouling his Helga treasure with T-shirt ripoffs that have become the norm among fiscally beleaguered cultural institutions.

And even though he has promised not to commercialize Helga, he does stand to profit from his copyright ownership of the works when they are used in books, catalogs, prints and other legitimate cultural uses. When Inquirer business reporter Peter Binzen asked him if he intended to make money out of Helga, he replied: "I don't know. I didn't buy it to make money. I consider it a national treasure." Helga is being kept in clean hands, by a man with a vision for extending the blessings of art creation and appreciation to the entire population of a sometimes shallow democracy.

Why should we be surprised? Walt Whitman taught us over a century ago that great art requires great audiences. The more citizens who sign on for Andrews' imaginative and innovative National Art Program, the greater will the audience be for his Helga treasures. Think of that when you join me and thousands of other lucky Americans taking their first looks at his Helgas at the National Gallery, their first public exposure. And those trigger-happy Russki's may even learn that it doesn't pay to mess with American journalists in the future either. America may finally be coming to possess its visual heritage, thanks to quixotic winners like Leonard E.B. Andrews.

from Art Matters, Feb, 1987, Philadelphia