Art: Grandma Goes to Europe

Vienna’s tiny Neue Galerie was bright last week with crude, cheery pictures of U.S. farm life, New York State style. The paintings were the work of 89-year-old “Primitive” Grandma Moses, making her first appearance before a European audience. Judging by her reception in Vienna, Grandma Moses’ grand tour through The Hague, Berne, and Paris will be something of a triumph.

“At last,” exclaimed one young gallerygoer on opening day, “a happy world!” An old lady peered through her lorgnette and cried: “Wonderful. She paints because she must paint just as birds sing because they must.”

The critics were less spontaneous: they wrote columns about “influences” they thought they saw in Grandma Moses’ 50 oils (which owe their greatest debt to the prints of Currier & Ives). One critic spoke of Renoir and the “early moderns”; a second of Flemish miniatures and Bruegel’s landscapes. Anyway, said another, “there’s something [in Grandma Moses] for everyone to enjoy, whatever their approach to art.”