Beauty for the Masses
Thompson, Frederic
14 THE COMMONWEAL May 8, 1929 BEAUTY FOR THE MASSES By FREDERIC THOMPSON LET me assume an initial prejudice against museums in general (with particular exceptions) and a prejudice (call...
...This we recommend...
...Think of all the pilgrimages to sainted and historic places that would be made possible...
...She began as a girl by the purchase of a Degas for $100 under the friendly offices of Mary Cassatt...
...and neglect of the House of God may be a puny bid for the whole world and is an immortal loss...
...It does...
...It may be beautiful enough to indulge the tourist, hat in hand, in the tenuous and doubtful sensuality of aesthetic appreciation...
...But more important than this—which is a sterile sensuality and which, it could be pointed out at another time, has led to degeneracy, injustice and suffering—most important is the fact that art in the Church has a functional importance...
...Think of the hungry souls seeking Eldorado who have rushed round the highways and byways in their cars and seen only hot dog stands, comfort stations, sign boards, gasoline pumps and identical main streets, who might at last stand before Mont Saint Michel, straggle up the country lanes of France from the sea-board through the chateau district to Paris, see not the extras but the best of the French masters in the Louvre and the Luxembourg 1 The expense...
...when we think of their frame churches, their few pictures May 8, 1929 THE COMMONWEAL 15 and statues, we wish some little of the world's accumulated capital of beauty could find its way to them...
...I am reminded of two young wives in a big city...
...Not always, I retort...
...The statuary looks cold, meaningless and repetitious...
...Safely consign art torn from its sources and function to the cold corridors of a mausoleum, and, packed in the family automobile, go for a picnic on the nearest unfenced estate...
...That there is scarcely any attempt to make museums inwardly or outwardly original in design, or beautiful in themselves —while it may be a generous gesture of not wishing to vie with what they shelter—seems in itself to confess that in them art is dead...
...If the objector (convenient to writers) objects to all the foregoing that the Louvre is perhaps the world's most famous museum and the French are the greatest of modern artists, I submit in rebuttal three propositions: first, that the nucleus of the Louvre collection is art removed by violence and without recompense to the originators and owners (stolen art, a blunt person might say) and admitting a fructifying influence from its presence, the evidence is incomplete because there is no way of ascertaining whether the art's influence might not have borne fruit finer than it did, if it had been left at home...
...Her bequest making her treasures the common property of the people, is typical of that generosity which seems to be one of the flowers of the democratic principle on which our nation is founded...
...Thus 2,000 people a year could be taken to and from Europe...
...True, if one's interest is purely intellectual, if one enjoys the study of comparative values, a technical inquisition into the diversities of methods, or an outline analysis of the trends and evolutions of art—then a museum is the place...
...The statue does not have to be of plaster...
...and that native, living art, truly appreciated art, had generally a functional place in the temple, later in the church, and in the palace and in the home...
...It is no derogation of such generosity as hers to maintain that too much art in museums is bad for a people, and that the money and intelligence exerted in this way should be given in other channels...
...But even for this, it seems to me, a museum offers only a bone heap...
...It did, of course, in past ages...
...The value of her bequest to students will be great...
...14 THE COMMONWEAL May 8, 1929 BEAUTY FOR THE MASSES By FREDERIC THOMPSON LET me assume an initial prejudice against museums in general (with particular exceptions) and a prejudice (call it that if you like) in favor of churches in general (with particular accentuations...
...For those who are sore and heavy laden it is a reminder of the heights of humanity, a symbol of courage, a mute call to courage...
...The museum attitude toward art—like British pride in the false and futilely colonnaded British Museum— is a curse which grows in our nation...
...of pioneers...
...Next to the Church I am prejudiced (call it that if you will) in favor of the harmonious home...
...the half might better be the whole of something else...
...secondly, the peculiar genius of the French people is intellectual refinement, logic, and under the influence of the Louvre, French schools of art have been derivative and degenerative (refinement of method with abatement of content) rather than surely progressive and creative (this point is highly controversial: it really gets back to the laicizing influence on art of the French Revolution and whether this has or has not had a degenerative effect...
...It leads the mind to think of the highest beauties that can be within the limits of our mortal being...
...Subsequently she and her husband enlarged the collection of paintings and objects of art into one of the finest private collections in the world...
...I believe a competent historian could demonstrate that museums were, in their origins, places for the exhibition of booty, places where the spoils of war of a Caesar or Napoleon could be displayed to impress the crowd...
...For instance, the recent bequest by Mrs...
...Munsey bequeathed $4,000,000 to the Metropolitan...
...A palace hung with many pictures and stuffed with statuary may be not as elevating as the church of Santa Maria degli Angeli in Assisi adorned with the frescoes of Giotto, or as alive as the thronged shrine of a saint beautifully memorialized in a modern church...
...Invention and business efficiency continually progress, so that the number of people benefited could be increased, and no doubt on such a wholesale scale, the rate now charged could be lessened and more people benefited...
...This is even more true of South America where old churches are adorned with paintings and frescoes as fine as any in the world...
...The increasing fashion for people of wealth to leave millions and million-dollar collections to museums is another sign of the rank exuberance of the museum attitude toward art...
...still it is a palace, and suggestions of temporal grandeur still cling to it and stir the imagination...
...It is a healthy sign...
...But neglect of the home is a shame...
...Of course, an objector (that phantom so convenient for writers) may object, the whole is better than the half and the half is better than nothing...
...It inspires...
...The average popular tourist third-cabin rate to Europe and return from New York, is $120...
...It is the sop to conscience of minds insensible to art or too busy motoring...
...and thirdly, the Louvre was a palace before it was a museum...
...It requires a most refined concentration to single out anything...
...Here again art is functional, not on as high a plane as in the Church, but in pleasant and decent limits...
...Some of the shrines of the early padres in Florida, Louisiana, Texas, New Mexico and California are still the uttermost of beauty made by man in our land...
...The serried rows of pictures clash one with another...
...Both beamed at the contemplation of this art: sanitary plumbing aestheticized, and why not...
...Economics, Bergson describes as the invisible war, which being true, the modern museum is no different from the old...
...The convenient objector may object, for the third and last time, that the museums are better than nothing for those who cannot afford to travel, and that they are a means for the exchange of culture...
...And there is no need to recommend it...
...Here the intellectual theory of art as an abstract thing-initself, has not withered art's humanity, as the theory has surely withered art in general as a force in our times...
...whereas an out-and-out museum inevitably has the atmosphere of a tomb or safe deposit vault...
...A museum to me is a dreary place...
...Beauty in the bath-room is more important than beauty in the museum...
...The late Mr...
...The Church is the sanctuary of living art...
...The enlightened philanthropist who wishes to give a gift of beauty to his people without levying on other people, will patronize the living, give beauty to the places where men and women worship, without pauperizing improve the appurtenances of the home, and leave to old and departed civilizations the vestures of their glory...
...A study, for instance, of the Italian primitives in the Metropolitan Museum of Art may yield the willing pupil a pedantic knowledge sufficient to confound the less meticulous, but it is dead and indigestible matter unless the student knows the art alive, animated with a soul, in some dusky Umbrian sanctuary or the beautifully proportioned wall of a palazzo...
...It may be, as happily once again more and more of our church statuary is, the product not of a mold or machine but of human hands, of hours of devoted and ecstatic work spent by an artizan loving what he works at...
...One said: "My dear, it's only two rooms with a kitchenette, but the bath-room has one of these pale sea-green porcelain tubs and the floor is big black-andwhite checks...
...When we hear of the work of poor missionaries in districts where humanity has not green glazed bathrooms, is ravaged by diseases of the flesh, and has no life of the soul beyond dark and hopeless myths...
...The beauties of nature taken at first hand are far more humanizing than art a la museum...
...Let us consider a specific alternative...
...At 6 percent this would yield $240,000 a year...
...It lives...
...it is the overwhelming practice...
...For souls in an ecstasy of gladness, it is a station before which they may objectivate their gladness, relate it and return it to the transcendant universe...
...I remember going from Paris down the Rhone, with unforgettable days in Avignon and Marseilles, over the Mediterranean to Corsica for two weeks in Ajaccio, Vizzavona, Bastia and Isle Rouse, back by way of Nice, and overnight on an express to Paris, all for $75...
...Better than the flower of a once living art, torn from its roots and soil, from the air, the warmth, the light that gave it birth, and now slowly returning to the original dust in a glass coffin in a tomb—better, I believe, in every human sense is even a plaster effigy of the Little Flower with roses in a vase before it and votive candles...
...True, we made not a few meals simple, of bread and cheese and wine —though we did taste without surfeit of the special local dainties and the vin du pays—and we slept overnight on the boat on deck, but such things should be game for their sons and grandsons (and daughters and granddaughters...
...H. O. Havemeyer to the Metropolitan Museum was generous and fine in motive beyond cavil...
...Her interest in art was sincere...
Vol. 10 • May 1929 • No. 1
