ART: American in Paris

Back home in Evanston, Ill. she is remembered as plain Gertrude McBrady, a glum girl in blonde braids. But in Paris' plush Maeght Gallery last week, she was redheaded, black-robed Mademoiselle O'Brady, the brilliant American artist.

By now, 41-year-old O'Brady is almost a Parisian. She arrived in Paris ten years ago, and modified her name because, she said, the "Mc" was hard for Frenchmen to pronounce. She combed the Seine bookstalls for 19th Century prints, and painted neat, nicely detailed oils that looked rather 19th Century. When the Nazis put her in a concentration camp, she turned to drawing her fellow prisoners, and learned delicate portraiture in line.

By war's end, O'Brady had refined her techniques to the point of excellence, while keeping her pictures childishly simple In content. The combination was as appetizing as pie à la mode. With her first Paris show (TIME, May 13, 1946), O'Brady was hailed by one critic as "the only great painter of the New World."

Once again last week, O'Brady's modest talent enchanted Paris. Her art needed no guide; her portraits were recognizable. Among her sitters: Jack-of-Arts Jean Cocteau, Poet Paul Eluard, and John Steinbeck (who urged her to return to the U.S. and paint American workmen).

She lives in a tiny Left-Bank hotel room littered with paints, clothes and cans of breakfast food. On a drawing board perched atop a suitcase on her bed, she paints the street scenes, bright with ladies in hoopskirts, which have made her locally famous. If one of her streets seems insufficiently cheerful, O'Brady adds a gaily colored balloon, an antique airplane or a fountain of fireworks overhead.

Doesn't that make her a bit of a surrealist? "Not at all," snaps O'Brady. "I'm as solid as bricks!"