BRITISH ART

Wairarapa Times-Age, 12 March 1942, Page 2

BRITISH ART

COMPARISON OF TYPES AN INTERESTING ADDRESS. DELIVERED TO ROTARY CLUB MEMBERS. Mr S. B. MacLcnnan, A.R.C.A., art master of the Wairarapa College, was the speaker at the Rotary Club lunch today, taking for his subject •■Contemporary British Art.” Architecture, the father of all the arts, we meet at home, at work, at worship and at play, said the speaker. Our advertisements, knives, forks, telephones, films, cars, paintings and a thousand other things have all been designed for us. Let us consider industrial art first. An artist should be as useful as any other member of the community- and it is surely as worthy to create a good carpet, a beautiful dress or a worthy piece of furniture, as it is to have a picture hung in the Academy. Present day artists and designers uphold the traditions of earlier days. London underground posters set a world standard and here we associate such names as Austin Cooper, Barnett Freedman. Edward Bawdcn. Gregory Brown and many other eminent artists besides such foreigners as McKnight Kauffer, the American, and Feliks Tobolski. the Pole. And we have Eric Gills type of faces and wood engraving, the New Zealander Keith Murray’s pottery. Marian Dorn’s fabrics, interior decorations and stage settings by Sherningham, typography by Mason and cartoons by Low.

In academic art the Royal Academy maintains a high standard of draughtsmanship and technique, continued the speaker. On the whole. Academic work, though accomplished, is lacking in inspiration and enterprise, though there remains the Modern, or. as they arc sometimes called, the Minority Group. These are the research workers in art. Their work makes little appeal to the majority. They usually achieve notoriety rather than fame and little prosperity. Since the Renaissance artists have tended to revel in aerial perspective and naturalism at the cost of the fundamentals, sentimentalism taking the place of sound structure. The invention of the camera helped to prove that naturalism is really a mechanical business and not the essence of art. The reaction gave rise to Cubism, Impressionism, Post Impressionism, Vorticism and later Surrealism, each playing its part in bringing a fresh outlook and new vitality to art. British war art is an jimportant section of contemporary work. At the beginning of the present war a council was formed to organise the making of a pictorial record.