Art in Grand Rapids

Grand Rapids is famed in the U. S. for its cheap, machine-made furniture. Less well-known is the fact that Grand Rapids contains more Dutch-blooded Americans than any other U. S. city. In 1846, when Dr. Albertus Christiaan van Raalte, reformer of the Dutch Reformed Church, was looking for a likely settling place, he picked the flat country near the east shore of Lake Michigan, founded the town of Holland. When hard times later hit Pastor van Raalte's flock, it moved inland to neighboring Grand Rapids, where its members' woodcarving talents found jobs in the rising furniture industry. Today, of Grand Rapids' 168,000 inhabitants, from a quarter to a third are of Dutch descent.

Last week, while the old country grappled with Hitler's Blitzkrieg, Grand Rapids' happier Dutch went to their prim, pillared Art Gallery to see the biggest collection of Dutch art Grand Rapids had ever seen. With eleven top-flight portraits by Rembrandt and Frans Hals as its central attraction, the exhibition (valued at some $2,000,000) covered 500 years of finely-turned painting, from the squirming, mystical fantasies of 15th-Century Hieronymus Bosch to the geometric designs of 20th-century Piet Mondrian. What made Grand Rapids Dutch almost as proud: the name of practically every artist in the show could also be found in the Grand Rapids telephone directory.

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