Everyone, even an art critic, has his own way of valuing pictures. Nils Nilsson Skum, a Laplander, values them according to one rule-of-thumb: how many reindeer do they show? His own crayon drawings sometimes have hundreds. He figures that must be why three Swedish museums own them. It was not the reason that Manhattan's Museum of Natural History put his pictures on exhibition last week. The Museum had found a primitive of the likes of upstate New York's octogenarian painter "Grandma" Moses (TIME, Oct. 21, 1940).
Skum's preoccupation with reindeer is not surprising. Throughout most of his 74 years he followed the...
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