How Art can help Bad Trade

Dominion, Volume 21, Issue 120, 18 February 1928, Page 15

How Art can help Bad Trade

Tt /BF ANY people might say that this was not the time to talk about I % Zl art ’ Trade was bad, the world was in a state of uproar, we I*/ I raUst ' eave art somc ot ' ler t,nic w ' lcn t ' , ' ngs werc selt ' cc l 1 V and we had plenty of money,” said Mr. J. B. Priestly, essayist,

critic, and novelist, opening at the Cartwright Hall, Bradford, an exhibition of works by the Wharfedale Group of Painters, after the remarks quoted above, he said: —

“I say that that is an entirely false idea; an extraordinarily harmful idea. A good work of art is equal to the most intimate talk you could have with a fellow-creature. A good artist communicates his mind, his most subtle thoughts and feelings, so that in art you have that appeal of imagination to imagination which is absolutely invaluable.

“Why', after all, is trade so bad? Why have we all this trouble? I take it these things arc due to two kinds of conflict—international conflict and industrial conflict; and I say that the basis of these conflicts is a lack of imagination, of imaginative understanding between man and man, and that

precisely that understanding can be supplied by art. There would be more tops and noils sold in Bradford this year if more old paintings, water colours, and etchings had been bought and studied in the past twelve months.” "Mr. Priestly is not straining the facts,” comments the “Yorkshire Post,” “when he attributes the present evil state of trade to conflicts both international and industrial, and these, in turn, to ‘lack of imagination, of imaginative understanding between man and man,’ and declares that ‘precisely that understanding can be supplied by art.’ There is a well-known anecdote of a lady expostulating with Turner over one of his drawings—‘But, Mr. Turner, I do not see things that way—and of his replying ‘Don’t you wish you could?' "The great artist enables us, even forces us, to see with his eyes, to understand with his understanding; and thereby he produces in those who study him an ability to understand each other sympathetically in the commop affairs of daily life. The times are certainly such as to require the prefection and employment to the utmost of every means of production and encouraging such sympathetic understanding.”