The Arts (magazine)/Volume 1/Issue 2

IN most civilized nations the art trade is one of the last to suffer when there is a depression in the business world. There was an interest in art among the warring European nations during the entire war, and now that the war is over there is a renaissance of art. We Americans do not, as a people, give art the importance which other peoples give it. We do not consider it so essential to life as did the nations of antiquity.

Why?

The reason is that our grandparents were so engrossed with clearing away the forest that they had no time for art. Yet our grandparents had an instinct for beauty far beyond that which we have today. Their homes were suited to the soil as ours are not. They would not have chosen a French architect to design Harvard as was done in the case of the buildings for the University of California. Each of the thirteen original Commonwealths had a style of its own. Each style was suited to the particular local landscape. We had a feeling for beauty widespread, democratic. During the middle of the Nineteenth Century the feeling for beauty on the part of the American people died.

Henry James, in some of his novels, and in "William Wetmore Story and His Friends," has pictured to us the aristocratic American of the latter part of the Nineteenth Century, his instinctive feeling for beauty gone, conscientiously striving to gain an appreciation of art in Europe. There is something touching, almost pathetic, in the hunger which those first pioneers felt for the culture of Italy and France. The immediate harvest was scant. Jarves, Hillard, Norton, Stillman were among the pioneers. Then came the multimillionaire who accepted the standards set by the pioneers and their successors, and art became the concern largely of the very rich.

In France it is not only the multi-millionaire who buys. All ranks of society are purchasers. Few are the dealers who do not cater to the trade of the man of small income. It is from such men that a large portion of the trade comes when there is a crisis in the business world. If we are to have a healthy art trade there must be a love for art permeating all ranks of society.

Other civilized nations love art as we do not. We have established tariff walls against works of art coming into America. Other nations so value their great works of art that it is the greatest hardship to let them leave the country, even in exchange for what we call the necessities of life. They appreciate that art is a necessity almost as bread and meat.

We are indebted to the Kleinberger Galleries for our frontispiece "Madonna and Child," attributed by Oswald Siren to the Florentine painter Gherardo Starnina.