ARTS YEAR BOOK

New Zealand Listener, Volume 16, Issue 396, 24 January 1947, Page 5

ARTS YEAR BOOK

Sir,-I think there is little need for Dr. Beaglehole or anybody else to be mystified about the purpose of the Arts in New Zealand Year-book. I take it that Mr. Wadman and Mr. Tombs have set out to provide, quite simply, a year-book-that is, a record of the work New Zealanders have done in the various arts during the course of the year. There is an obvious need for such a publication. It will. be usefitl to refer back to these volumes in 1950, or 1970, and see what * was being done in 1945, 1946, and so on. (From this point of view it might even be justifiable to publish a certain ‘number of bad examples, just as museum pieces, provided they were sufficiently interesting.) Some basic critical stan-dard-not necessarily the very highestis of course implied, but there is no need for the editor to try to hatch out a phoenix every year. Phoenixes aren’t hatched, in any case. There is a good deal of "damned scenery" in the year-book for the reason that most New Zealand painters are interested in landscape. Perhaps they are too exclusively interested ,in it. Perhaps some of their work is inclined to be dull. On balance, I think it is better that they should be working patiently at this rudimentary level than apeing cosmopolitan manners. We must avoid cultural hydroponics. At the same time, I agree wholeheartedly with Dr. Beaglehole about the need for establishing critical standards. If fine critical articles are published in the Year-book, that is all to the good. But I think that, in the main, this re- . fining and sharpening process should be carried out in other places. The Yearbook, by recording the broad: movement of the arts, helps to make us more coherent, and at the same time provides useful material for the critic-a sort cf continuous art gallery, existing not to enshrine the occasional masterpiece, but to display the characteristic work of this period and that. Judged from this point of view, I think the Year-book does very great credit to its hard-working editor and publisher. As for the poetry section, I can assure Dr. Beaglehole that the question of catholicity of taste hardly arises; the problem being, not to weed out a small selection from a vast mass of material, ‘but (largely by writing begging letters) to get together a body of work that is at least competent and presentable. If Dr. Beaglehole knows where any good poems can be come by, poems that are at present being overlooked, I am sure Mr. Wadman will be delighted to have them for next year’s book. The Year-book would be dangerous if it set itself up too arrogantly as the official arbiter of taste, or if it showed complacency. I see no evidence of these things. The thing to realise is that it is, first and foremost, a year-book-a sort of Wisden of the arts-not an attempt to cover the whole ground of criticism.

A. R. D.

FAIRBURN

(Devonport),

Sir--In reviewing the 1946 Year Book of the Arts in New Zealand J. Ce Beaglehole says: ".. Anything of the sort, to realise its great potential value, needs to be firmly grounded on a set of clearly thought out critical convictions." No

doubt there should be in such a compilation (which I have not seen) an ine troduction, essay, or general commentary covering what is included in the book and giving valuations based on the writer’s claim to competence as a critic. But, in my judgment, the value. of such a work rests largely, not on any clearly enunciated critical convictions, but on * the convictions to be deduced from the work of the artists. Mr. Beaglehole finds it difficult to decide what the. Year Book is driving at. Although I have not seen it yet, this comment indicates that the compilation is fulfilling its ‘true function, namely, that of reflecting the disoriented, disorganised, and groping mind of mankind. -If, as Priestly contends, there is a grand universal mind of which we individuals may form the cells, I think that mind is at present sick. Your own editorial in the same issue refers to the lost values of words, and says: "Before words lose their value, men and women have lost their character.’’ When vital words such as

liberty, freedom, democracy, truth, are used in ways that prostitute the meanings they have hitherto had, it is no wonder if our arts, which uncannily reveal our mental and spiritual states, do not fit into categories hitherto held to be valid. Art schools seem unconsciously to reflect mass movements of the human mind; the pre-Raphaelites and Impressionists grew out of revolutionary fervours in Europe. May not our aft of to-day be symptomatic of the universal upheaval in the world? And ¢an we look for clearly thought out critical convictions in a world where about the only clear conviction seems to be that we must at least survive either by hook or crook.

J. MALTIN

MURRAY

(Oamaru),