Life Without Art

New Zealand Listener, Volume 16, Issue 399, 14 February 1947, Page 5

Life Without Art

N the Phaidon book of Canadian art, reviewed on Page 30 of this issue, there is this bold declaration by the "Group of Seven" who made Canadian painting Canadian. "Art must grow and flourish in a country before ‘that country becomes a real home for its people." Art is of course a wider term than painting and was perhaps not used in its widest sense when that declaration was made in Toronto. But although many people are not consciously interested in art, and not even receptive to it in any sense of which they are aware themselves, the declaration in its fullest sense is true. Whatever else art is, it is the communication of emotion, the fears, the hates, the loves, the reverences that make life what it is and ourselves what we are. Men can and do live in the most inhospitable places. They can even live there indefinitely without any great injury that science can detect: in the desert, in the jungle, in snow, in eternal wind, in almost unceasing rain. But such places do not become their home unless they somehow or other get into the current of their emotions. And that is always the case with young countries. They are not home until their people cease looking elsewhere for emotional satisfaction. New Zealand is not home for a dwindling but still . considerable number of the people living here. For them Britain is still home, and only British things satisfy: British speech, British newspapers, British churches, British landscapes, British attitudes. It is no reflection on them or on New Zealand. It means simply that their emotions have not been captured here. But art, some manifestation of art whether we recognise it or not, changes all that. It gives life emotional content, and in proportion as it is the expression of a particular environment makes that environment home. Home is not the place where we live, but the place where we live content; and it is art, our own art, that makes it such a place. Until that happens all the emotions that give life its deepest meaning are centred on far-off things and we don’t like the sound of our own voices.