FRENCH ARTISTS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 16 August 1943, Page 5

FRENCH ARTISTS

CONDUCTING SECRET PAPER. . DESIRE TO BE IN FRONT RANK OF PATRIOTS French artists have their clandestine paper, “L’Art Francais,” published in Paris. The cover shows the famous Arc do Triomphe, Paris, with an indication of flags around it, and the flame of remembrance towering upwards above the tomb of the Unknown Soldier of the last war.

It carries its programme and its belief in the following lines: “Artists know that a victorious Germany would stifle French art, this pure jewel of civilisation, treating it as a useless luxury of an enslaved people and as the inadmissible manifestation of the creative vitality of France, or as an intolerable offence to the myth of German racial superiority. “French artists will wish ever to be in the front ranks of patriots.” An issue which has just reached 'London contains a review of an art exhibition in Paris at which the critic says only one canvas moved him, that of a prisoner of war. As he walked I from picture to picture, he said, he i could hardly believe that outside there i were “long lines of women in queues | before empty food shops; that a million prisoners were being held and forced io labour, and that at the very moment there were cars drawing up before French factories, loaded with armed hnen, come to drag away hundreds ot brothers into slavery.”