Art: Paris in the Spring

May was chasing April out of Paris’ sidewalk cafés last week. And to certify, for the 15 8th year, that spring had really arrived, the Salon opened in Paris’ Palais de New York (the erstwhile Palais de Tokyo). It was the usual grab-bag of more and less competent academicians which gallery-goers had learned to expect.

If the Paris Salon was old stuff, the Left Bank Galerie de Bac was fresh as a daisy. Its show sent critics scrambling for superlatives. The object of their admiration was 40-year-old Gertrude O’Brady from Evanston, Ill. She was the protégée of Critic Anatole Jakovsky (Bref), who led the field by burbling: “O’Brady is the only great painter of the New World.” Critic Maximilien Gauthier (Opéra) predicted that O’Brady would become a “great name in the history of art.”

Back home in Evanston she was remembered as an anemic, gloomy-looking blonde named McBrady (she changed her name because the pronunciation of “Me” stumps the French). Gertrude liked playing the piano and wearing her hair in braids.

In 1938 she lit out for Spain to fight the fascists, but never got there. By the time she reached Paris her anemia was so serious that she had to go to bed. She whiled away a long convalescence by taking up art. Soon she became infatuated with the 1900s, combed the bookstalls for period prints to paint from. When the Nazis arrived and put her in Vittel concentration camp, she had achieved her first goal: simple escape pictures that almost anyone could escape into.

O’Brady had never had a lesson, and her work showed it. But the best of it possessed an effective if awkward directness. Au Bout on d’Or (see cut) looked static at first glance, but it had just the sexy-sweet, penny-arcade nostalgia she was trying for: the memory of summer nights when it is too hot to pull the shades and the city turns into a bright hive of private worlds.

O’Brady had no urge to be a selfconscious “primitive,” and in Vittel she set about learning the rules of representational drawing. With Red Cross pencils, and with fellow prisoners for models, she spent the time behind barbed wire turning into a better-than-competent craftsman.

French critics have compared her pre-Vittel paintings to those of Douanier Rousseau, her later pencil portraits to Fouquet’s. In an age of sweeping confusion in art her pictures were at least disarmingly limited and nicely drawn.