ART CRITICS

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 2, Issue 246, 8 June 1932, Page 6

ART CRITICS

THE LAYMAN AND THE MAN WHO KNOWS WHAT TO LIKE. DR. ELLIOTT'S VIEWS. WELLINGTON. "There are two kinds of art critics, one, the inspired amateur, who is no judge, but knows what he likes, and the other kind, who knows what to like," said Dr. J. S. Elliott, in the course of his speech when opening the autumn exhibition of the New Zealand Academy of Fine Arts in Wellington. If painting a picture was an art, he said, so also was criticism of a picture an art, which required long training, much experience, intellect,

and above all, sensibility and feeling. "Bacon said that men delighted in the spacious liberty of generalities ratber than in the enclosures of particularly, so far as it he for me to refer to contemporary art exeept with bated breath,".Dr. Elliott said. "To discuss a picture with its painter is like laying sacrilegious hands on the i Ark of the Covenant. I shall give no offence, I trust, if I make the safe re« mark that the well known picture by Sir Luke Fieldes of "The Doctor" shares an honoured place with "Phar Lap" in the homes of the people and provides' a distraction from the pictures on hire from Hollywood. "I cannot spealc with authority like an art critic, but merely I trust with common sense, when I say from purely the physician's point of view that the medicine bottle on the table in the pic-

ture of "The Doctor" is much too large to have been ever ordered for a child, and the bedside manner of the doctor is open to objection, for the elbow which supports his tired, massive and unusually hairy head is not resting on his knee, which the artist hoped for, but on the dying child. "There was never a picture that was painted, however mad in design or execution, that cannot be praised , in some way, either for its strength or else for its restraint, for its atmosphere or at the very least for self- . expression," Dr. Elliott added. "As for the pictures of the ultra-modern school, they strike us speechless, or : perhaps we can murmur: T should never have thought that it was what it is'."