Art: A Cozy Corner

“Well, it seems that it just had to be this way. I look for a gallery and you for an artist. . . . So we are set to go.”

Thus wrote 56-year-old Papsdorf of Detroit to Manhattan’s Perls Galleries in simple preamble to one of the most direct artist-dealer relationships on record. Last week, Perls opened Papsdorf’s first Manhattan show, promptly sold seven Papsdorfs, began negotiating with collectors and museums over others.

Fred Papsdorf’s painting is as unpretentious as his prose. He showed 27 canvases plainly close to his heart: My Father’s Writing Table, Abie’s Old Home, Weeds, Hills of Ohio. There were five gay, floral still lifes, four careful scenes of farm life, a depressing study of grimy Detroit houses, and one small, meticulously observed interior called Poverty. Commenting on Poverty for a prospective customer, Papsdorf once wired: “Years ago working for a life insurance company entered many homes mostly poor seeing them live thus hence Poverty.”

The recent faddism over self-taught (modern “primitive”) painters has not spoiled thin, bespectacled Fred Papsdorf.He has had modest success and has gotten museum ranking after only six years of serious oil painting. But he still reminds art circles of the late, great, triumphantly simple Pittsburgh “primitive,” John Kane.

Born in Dover, Ohio, Papsdorf has al ways lived in Ohio or Michigan. His German-born ex-missionary father sent him to grade schools, kept a sharp eye on his son’s pastimes. Fred Papsdorf made his own beginner’s colors out of stray tinted chalk mixed with linseed oil, later ordered10¢ tubes of mail-order paint (pictures made with these paints, he says, have held correct color values through the years).

Papsdorf moved to Detroit, in 1927 took a job with the Borden Co. as checker of milk bottles. Though he has sold some 200 pictures, he is still checking bottles six days a week for Borden. He paints in “a corner of our dining room, very cozy, and always ready for work.” Recently someone told him an interesting rumor about Painter Ivan Le Lorraine Albright (TIME, Nov. 24, 1941). Fred Papsdorf later remarked: “Mr. Albright sold one painting in Chicago for $30,000. That is some money. One never knows what lies before him in Art.”