Brooklyn Primitive

One-eyed Israel Litwak. a stocky little grey-fringed man, was too old to make furniture any more. At 68. he was not even up to varnishing, and so he lost his job. "Then," he recalls, "all of a sudden came out of me an artist!"

This week the Russian-born Brooklyn cabinetmaker was 78, and on his way to minor fame in the screwball wing of primitive (self-taught) art. Fifteen of his "primitives" were on exhibit in a Manhattan gallery and selling well, at $300-$750 apiece.

Litwak is already hankering after the mantle of famed Primitive Henri Rousseau (1844-1910), the Parisian customs inspector who retired to paint leafy jungle fantasies, without ever having seen a jungle. Says Litwak of Rousseau: "Plenty to criticize, but all right." He prefers him to Pittsburgh's late John Kane, long considered the No. 1 U.S. primitive, who painted fussy toy trains and muscular self-portraits. Nowadays the field is crowded with such deliberate amateurs as upstate New York's 85-year-old "Grandma" Moses (TIME, Oct. 21, 1940) and fellow Brooklynite Morris Hirshfield, 73-year-old retired slipper manufacturer who paints nudes with bas-relief noses and lions with custom-tailored, button-on manes.

Like most contemporary primitives, Litwak is a far less sophisticated artist than the Cro-Magnon whose paintings, the earliest known, were found in a cave at Altamira,. Spain. The caveman's graceful, seemingly off-hand study of a charging bison was obviously true to life but Litwak's view of the Metropolitan Museum (see cut) is just as obviously a cockeyed, childlike impression, painted with the cramped, awkward care of an adult artisan. Explains Artist Litwak, whose colors are as hot and heavy as a fur coat in June: "I must have everything correct, just so."

Litwak started drawing pictures in crayon, later turned to oils because, he says, "the public is not used yet to crayon work."

But oils are less convenient for Litwak: his landlady in Brooklyn hates the smell of turpentine, and refuses to let him paint with the windows shut. Litwak's solution is simply to sketch his compositions on canvas in the winter, and color them in when summer comes and the windows can be left open.

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