Needles in a Haystack
NEEDLES IN A HAYSTACK THERE is a good deal of interesting talk about museums in the current Atlantic Monthly, and with the conclusions which it proposes we have more than a little sympathy. Art is...
...This tendency is, of course, not limited to museums...
...Judas derives all his terrible significance from the fact that he was one of the Twelve...
...Though many of the best pictures now in America are privately owned, the museums have so many fine things that a discriminating use of them might make them the collective possession of all...
...It may, then, be not wholly unreasonable to suppose that diverse fire insurance companies are thankful that so few artists have become converts...
...They have grown out of an intrinsically healthy desire to conserve treasure...
...The Venus of Milo would probably have been turned into stucco long since if the vast purposiveness of the Louvre had remained a dream...
...It has merely, now and then, initiated people into the joy of contemplation and into that secret which we can only term experience of reality...
...Now jumboism is always bad (excepting possibly in circuses) but it is particularly destructive in the domain of art...
...Their effect is likewise much more obvious...
...Only so will teaching make any progress...
...Mather feels that he is saying nothing of which "the more enlightened museum officials themselves are unaware" when he avers that "the great American art museums are an eloquent expression of our general tendency toward jumboism...
...It is much more appalling to behold good and bad mingled in unconscious company than to confront the unadulterated bad...
...This would help preservation and consultation...
...Returning to museums (which may help to explain other aberrations) one feels that circumstances have had much to do with their present plight...
...It has seeped into all aspects of building and is, perhaps, the greatest flaw in our vastly improved architectural ornamentation...
...The court-houses of little towns which antedate the Civil War are literally stuffed with cannon balls and brass buttons which seemed too precious to destroy, and the store of German gas-masks which have recently been added is too large for the imagination to estimate...
...But not content to wait for time to supply the decorative additions, which tax the resources of masters, those in charge order inchoate masses of fresco and mosaic which transform the whole into an indescribable artistic pandemonium...
...Their appeal is much more immediate and impressive than is that of literature or music...
...One hamlet museum we know of actually has hundreds of pioneer grandmother earrings, which if melted in toto would just about suffice to purchase some modern young lady a fur coat...
...And while the presence of two wofully tawdry frescoes in an otherwise appropriate church is a matter of lesser importance, it actually makes one feel that the whole House of God is cheap and unworthy...
...And the relationship between canvas and curator is so intimate that it may almost be said to determine the survival of painting...
...Long rooms crowded with faded landscapes are expected to coalesce, through some miracle, into an unforgettably masterful unit...
...Ruskin was surely right when he told the lady from Edinburgh that she could not learn how to paint in her home town because there was no "great art" for miles around...
...A host of more or less imitative renaissance drawings must substitute for one good Raphael...
...A moderate dose of learning will do it no harm, and is even necessitated by the science which underlies so much characteristically modern work...
...But when you set out to establish an art collection in the imperialistic spirit of dazzling everybody, you must somehow have greatness thrust upon you...
...The scholar is served by every shred of material which has survived, but the public also has its rights...
...There is a somewhat apocryphal story of an American sculptor who was driven to commit arson upon discovering that the owners of a fine colonial mansion had decked it out with cheap copies of the indefatigably atrocious Thorvaldsen...
...Few of the very greatest pictures or statues are available for American museums...
...If some way could be found for bringing the splendor of masterful canvases and statues directly to the consciousness of working crowds, it is a safe conjecture that the general outward appearance of the country would change for the better in a generation...
...We mark everywhere," says Professor Mather, "as the museums are made increasingly confusing and difficult for the public, an attempt at compensations of a Barnumistic sort-endeavors to wheedle the public into the museums instead of attracting them by the legitimate method of acquiring beautiful things and exhibiting them well...
...This taste is in large measure present, as indeed it is latent in unspoiled human nature...
...It is all very natural, very touching, very curious, but it is not art...
...Always and everywhere the American museum is an expression of generosity and thrift...
...Here for instance is an imposingly large church, the structural style employed in which deserves approval...
...The visual arts are, it would seem, the road along which those who seek contact with the beautiful must first walk...
...Granted the value of extensive collections to the student, it is already obvious that they imperil seriously the development of that public good taste upon which growth in the arts depends...
...Not a few earnest communities have hired brushmen with a gift for restoration dutifully to pink-cheek dozens of the dowdiest old portraits imaginable...
...It would be a great improvement if all mediocre canvases more than a hundred years old were removed from exhibition galleries and filed away for reference precisely as the great majority of library volumes are kept in the stacks...
...It is not that any of us are opposed to museums as such...
...People have made bequests of their pictures and bric-a-brac in the sincere belief that they were sharing the enjoyment of beauty with their less fortunate fellow-men...
...The human result is that some dozen persons ultimately acquire the power to discourse on the historical development of oil or egg tempera, while the majority of citizens trot up Fifth Avenue in the deluded hope of improving their minds...
...It would also afford simple grandeur of setting for what is abidingly, universally beautiful...
...Here it can only mean an eclecticism which substitutes information for quality...
...and so our people should have the great in painting and sculpture where they can see it and where it is not merely a needle in a haystack...
...Rightly used, art never improved anybody's mind...
...In both cases you come upon many lesser lights, some of them very small indeed, while the orb sought for eludes detection...
...Art is housed on too grandiose and chaotic a scale...
...And of course when you get into the realm of pictures you tread on carpets of awe...
...But just as we do not give a child to whom we wish to teach English speech a dictionary in lieu of the example of decorous and melodious usage, so also we are on the wrong track if we make the open sesame to art an illustrated catalogue rather than illustrious example...
...How precious is a strip of canvas...
...Much has already been done, but the recipe for continued improvement is sound popular education...
...The thing bursts upon him in varying degrees of splendor until he is bowled over by sheer impact and a splitting headache...
...Finding one's way to a Goya or a Brueghel in a place like the Metropolitan is like hunting for a gunman in Chicago...
...If one is at all sensitive to values, the total effect is distressing in the extreme...
...We need that collective possession very badly...
...And the poor mortal who goes for the sake of art is in even a worse plight...
...What we all wonder is simply whether existing housing conditions are either socially or artistically right...
Vol. 11 • December 1929 • No. 7
