Backwoods Baby

In 1938, a big, glum-looking music student from Evanston, Ill. boarded a boat for Paris. She had a round-trip ticket, but was in no hurry to use the return half. Last week Gertrude O'Brady was back in Manhattan, calling up old friends with the invitation: "Come and see me, I've become a painter!" One day in Paris she had had a date with an art critic, and as a joke he had bought her some paints. "I was an absolute backwoods baby," says O'Brady. "I told him I couldn't think what to paint. 'Paint you and me going to the country on a bicycle,' he suggested, and so I did.

"It's very hard to explain how you can suddenly become a painter, especially for me--I talk like a Spanish cow--but my life absolutely changed from that minute. I started painting 12 and 15 hours a day. I never went to the cafes; I lost all my friends. When the war started I thought, 'Let the bombs fall. They won't fall on me; I have too much work to do.'"

Interned by the Nazis, Expatriate O'Brady taught herself to draw by doing pencil portraits of other inmates. After her release, she began exhibiting neat, sweet Paris street scenes, garnished with wandering nudes and airplanes decked in flowers. In a Paris jaded with more sophisticated art, her simplicity hit the spot. Wrote one critic: "The only great painter of the New World" (TIME, May 13,1946).

Manhattan critics were not that enthusiastic about her first Manhattan show, which opened last week, but they liked it. The surrealist touches which spiced her earlier works had disappeared. Her new gouaches were tightly painted and mostly recognizable glimpses of empty Paris courtyards and old-fashioned shop fronts, looking rather like backdrops for an intimate vaudeville show. Every cobblestone was separately outlined, and the shop signs were painstakingly lettered in.

"Now I want to travel around the country," said Artist O'Brady. "Also I'll have to visit Evanston. Papa--he's 84 now--is still spouting steam because I'm a painter." In Evanston, Gertrude O'Brady would be remembered as a blonde girl named McBrady (she modified her name to make it easier for the French to pronounce). Now, at 43, she sometimes fumbles English words, her braids are red instead of blonde, and she has made art-loving Paris take her work and like it.

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