MISCELLANY

Press, Volume LXXXIX, Issue 27047, 23 May 1953, Page 3

MISCELLANY

Grandma Moses. My Life's History. Introduction by Louis Bromfield. Edited by Otto Kailir. Andre Deutsch. 140 pp.

Grandma Moses is famous as the old lady, without education or previous training in painting, who began to paint when she was over 70. Her paintings not only went straight to the heart of the Great American Public, but have also won the approbation of serious critics of art. She is still painting at the age of 92. She is a "primitive” painter; details are often drawn “wrong" or clumsily represented, and she often insists on naturalistic devices, such as the use of “glitter” on her winter landscapes to make the snow really sparkle. But the simplicity, sense of form, the playful imagination and fresh apprehension of the beauty of the New York-Vermont countryside give her paintings a profound appeal which few can resist. Her instinctive mastery of colour and composition is one of the most extraordinary miracles in the history of modern painting. In this book Grandma Moses, with the help of Mr Otto Kailir, tells the story of her life, which has been taken down from dictation. Not a single sentence that is not by Grandma Moses herself has been added, Mr Kailir assures us; the result is an authentic picture of the life of the artist, told in her own simple, ungrammatical sentences. Beautiful reproductions of a number of her paintings, pictures of Grandma at work and of her parents, and facsimiles of some of her letters complete a most interesting work.

Inns of Australia. By Paul McGuire. Heinemann. 284 pp. Written in a genial and witty manner, suited to its subject, this account of Australian inns past and present is both entertaining and informative. The author is a scholarly student of Australian social histoiy but he wears his learning lightly. He has turned aside from the writing of a more massive study of the peopling of Australia to write this history of its inns because he found that his files—“whether dedi-| cated to religion, transport, roads, education, art, trade, industry, politics or the rest”—were constantly producing accounts of inns, hotels ana taverns. They were vital points in the new country, following—sometimes even preceding—its settlement. They acted as meeting-places, political hustings, post offices, doctors’ and dentists’ rooms, theatres, local government offices and even churches; hundreds of towns grew about inns established at river-crossings, watering-places for flocks and herds or coaching stages. Paul McGuire recalls and describes all the most famous of these early inns and the personalities associated with them, fashionable hotels, holiday inns and city hostelries taking their place beside village and wayside inns. He has a fascinating collection of illustrations, eight of them in colour, of typical inns and their environs, with one or two of such interesting details as hotel-menus or bills of the last century. He does not disguise the fact that the modern Australian hotel often offers poor service and the modern innkeeper is sometimes without a sense of vocation; such men, he says, “should of course be drowned in butts of sour beer.” But the Australian tradition is not to be judged by its poorest modern examples; at Hornblow’s at Hall’s Creek, Hornblow was once tossed into a waterhole because he would not serve all night. Mr McGuire, a civilised chronicler, records but ne does not exhort; and his book is packed with human interest and a sense of the vigorous life of a robust young nation. The Story of the Rockefeller Foundation. By Raymond B. Fosdick. With a Foreword by John D. Rockefeller,, Jun. Odhams Press. 352 pp. The great foundations of the group of Americans who accumulated colossal fortunes in the prosperous years 1900-1925 constitute a social phenom- 1 enon without parallel in any age. In company with men like Carnegie, Morgan, Guggenheim, Huttington, and a dozen others, John D. Rockefeller used his fortune in his lifetime for philanthropic and cultural purposes on a scale hitherto unimaginable. He contributed ultimately nearly 500,000,000 dollars for the foundation of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, the General Education Board, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Fund. AU these organisations are trusts, adminis-v tered independently by boards of trustees and in no sense under the control of the original benefactor. This book describes in impressive detail their launching and their achievements--in 93 different countries —and presents the results of their experience for the consideration of other charitable trusts. It is a well written document of great interest to all concerned with the social history of our times. The author was president of the foundation from 1936-1948.