Art: Dutch Treats

The first big fashion to threaten U.S. decoration since the advent of surrealism is the bumptious patterns of hearts, birds, stylized flowers and valentine scrolls that constitute Pennsylvania Dutch art.

Even Philadelphia’s terrible-tempered Dr. Albert C. (“Argyrol”) Barnes, who owns more Renoirs than the Louvre, has the Pennsylvania Dutch itch. In one of his best vitriol-blue shirts, white-haired Collector Barnes was one of those who went last week to the little town of Norristown, Pa., to inspect an exhibition of antiquated German-American knickknacks. In the barrel-vaulted attic of its knackwurst-colored Town Hall, Norristown held its annual Antiques Show, one of a chain of country-fair dealers’ exhibitions that periodically sweep the towns of the Pennsylvania Dutch ‘country like an epidemic of German measles.

To hawk-eyed collectors who know a Pennsylvania spatterware spittoon from a New England Paul Revere soup ladle, Norristown’s antique show, held a flight of stairs above an old market where bearded Amish and Mennonite farmers sell their produce, offered as much good hunting as a well-stocked game preserve. Its gaily painted kitchen cabinets, dower chests, desks and tables, Bethlehem painted glass, grotesque Germanic Toby jugs and brightly colored tinware are far more colorful than the prim, functional antiques of New England. Their artistic flavor was well represented by Norristown’s reconstructed old-fashioned Pennsylvania Dutch country store, in which heavily skirted, buxom saleswomen sold such newly popular items as hair ribbons, school slates, stick candy, kerosene lamps, penny banks, flannel underwear.

And the crowds which went to Norristown were one more sign of how the artistic wind is blowing. U.S. designers are busy turning out imitation Pennsylvania Dutch napkins, tablecloths, furniture, dishes. Manhattan’s Theater Guild is busy rehearsing a Pennsylvania Dutch play (Papa Is All). U.S. advertising artists are using Pennsylvania Dutch tulip designs as borders for cosmetic ads. Every big Manhattan department store has stocked its shelves to cope with the trend. Most of the Pennsylvania Dutch bric-a-brac now sold commercially might bring blushes to the face of a good Mennonite, Dunkard or Amish. But U.S. housewives have set out to beat the Dutch.

London revealed that when British Air Chief Marshal Sir Frederick Bownill, Atlantic Ferry Command head, flew from Canada to England last fortnight (TIME, Oct. 20) his bomber carried an unusual cargo: 100 yards of canvas for London’s firemen to paint pictures on. It was sent by the Montreal Arts Club, which, impressed by a recent Canada exhibition of London firemen’s art, had decided to do something “in admiration of the fine work of the men who fought the battle of flames and recorded it in paint.”