Unknown Masters

To Europeans, who generally assume they have seen everything, the show was something of a revelation. "Curious paradox: the youngest among the world's great powers, the United States possesses the oldest, the most original, and just about the most authentic naive painters," admitted Paris' Figaro Litteraire with an air of astonishment. The show consisted of 111 naive American paintings from the collection of Edgar William and Bernice Chrysler Garbisch, and by the time it closed, 35,000 Frenchmen had flocked to the Grand Palais to see it. In Berlin, 15,000 poured through the Amerika Haus during a six-week showing, and in London the Sunday Times commented admiringly: "We seem here to be offered the image of a vanished people and a faraway mode of life reflected in an eye as clear and sharp and unobsequious as a bird's."

Colonel Garbisch, a West Point graduate and onetime All-America center who made a fortune in the grocery-products business, is not surprised by Europe's response to his paintings. Neither is his wife, whose father was the late Automaker Walter Chrysler and whose brother, Walter Jr., is a collector of note. "Europeans had never had the opportunity to see this kind of art before," she explains. The Garbisches bought their first naive paintings to decorate their country house on Maryland's Eastern Shore, then fell in love with them. "I guess it's because they have such honesty," Mrs. Garbisch says. Over a period of 25 years they bought around 2,600 pieces, many of which they have already given away to museums from Boston and Richmond to Fort Worth and San Francisco.

Washington's National Gallery of Art has received the most. It keeps a constantly changing selection on permanent view. Next week, as the traveling exhibition ends its triumphant two-year, twelve-city tour of Europe and North America, 35 choice items will rejoin the collection in the nation's capital. This is appropriate enough, since the skillful but unschooled work of these painters is distinctly American.

Innocent Eye. The artists were "naive" only in their lack of formal training. They were sign painters, cabinetmakers and seamstresses who plied their trades in the small towns and along the dusty roads of a rural America. Unlike contemporary Europeans and the Europe-trained professionals of the cities, they had no museums or art schools to learn from. Nevertheless, they worked out their own way of painting by applying the loving craftsmanship of a working artisan to the innocent eye of the artistically uneducated.

The result was an art of extraordinary originality. Despite faulty perspective, their landscapes were far more realistic and accurate in their details than the "artistic" landscapes of contemporary Europe. Portraits, though anatomically uncertain, are often livelier and more shrewdly observed than the conventional dollfaces of many well-trained Europeans. T. Skynner, in his Portrait of a Woman, could not quite manage the hands, but makes a kind of hieratic icon out of the worn dignity of a simple New England lady.

The naive Americans were especially gifted at fantasy. The surrealist cat created by an unknown artist, looming hugely out of a sea of grass with a bird in its mouth and its eyes on future victims, is as haunting as Alice's Cheshire--and more terrifying. Another unknown painter imagined a fantastic city of medieval towers and Renaissance palaces approached by a steam-propelled sailing ship of the very latest type around 1850--a vision of Europe, perhaps, by an artist who knew it only in his dreams.

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