International studio (82.1925)

mceRnAcionAL

HERE AND EVERYWHERE

Hie et ubique ? then We'll shift out? gvound..

—'he plan of. the Los Angeles Museum of
/ History, Science and Art to open the first
unit of the new Los Angeles Museum m
November with what promises to be a real Pan-
American Exhibition of oil paintings has a pro-
found significance not only local but national and
international. In its local aspect this exhibition is
highly important since it includes the cooperation
of the board of supervisors of Los Angeles county
(think of an American county board of supervisors
being interested in an art show!), the board of
governors of the museum, and of the patrons and
friends of the institution. In its national aspect
it will once more draw the painters of all the states
into a closer artistic relation and will make for an
interchange of ideas and a correlation of American
art ideals achieved nowhere so completely and so
fittingly as in an exhibition of this character. It is
one of the most admirable features of this plan
that it hopes to have an adequate representation
of the work of Canadian painters whose work is
too little known among us (I recall a particularly
brilliant display of Canadian paintings in New
York a few years ago) and of that of the artists of
Latin-America. This should give us a compre-
hensive panorama of the pictorial art of the West-
ern Hemisphere, much more representative in fact
than is ever seen in official groups of European art
shown here, for it is a part of the American genius
in arranging exhibitions of this kind that the
"official" note is happily absent. Unquestionably
our international expositions of this kind are emi-
nently more satisfactory than in the case of foreign
displays where a ministry of art must control the
selection of work shown and where, too often, art
politics show a heavy, deadening hand.

The date selected for the opening and closing
of this Pan-American exhibition, November 3d to
January 1st, mark an interval when tourists to
California are many. Their presence there and
attendance at the Los Angeles show will do much
for American art propaganda, the opening of a new
museum being an attraction in addition to the
exhibition itself. Artists and friends of art the
country over will delight in the prospects held out
by Los Angeles and will wish it every success.
One of the inevitable results of an international
exhibition of this kind is to reveal to Americans
what a living thing the school of American art is
and how superbly it reflects American character
in its portraits and landscapes.

ustralasia seldom appears in the news of
the art world north of the Equator save when
a rare Australian painter appears among us
or when that continent's chief art fund acquires a
noteworthy painting in London. Of New Zealand
no mention of its art activities ever reached me
until the National Academy of Design in New
York announced it was sending a considerable
collection of paintings by its members to a South
Seas exhibition to be held in Dunedin, New
Zealand, in November. Of course "South Seas"
was simply a romantic title and the soft, yielding
influences of the real South Sea island life have
nothing to do with the keen, practical hard-
working New Zealander (types of whom we saw
in the Anzacs of World War memories) any more
than it had to do with us, outside of the moving
pictures. My curiosity being aroused as to "why
Dunedin in art?" I satisfied this wanting to know
by consulting the encyclopedia.

In the seventy-seven years of its existence the
colony that has become Dunedin has established
an Athenaeum and a museum (my source of
information says these are noteworthy buildings,
the museum having a fine biological collection)
and a school of arts in the university. But the rest
is silence in so far as the art activities of Dunedin
are concerned. But the final sentence in the ency-
clopaedia's description of the city and its neigh-
borhood struck me as being full of promise to the
American artists whose work has been sent to New
Zealand. It reads: "Gold-dredging, in the hands
of rich companies, remains a primary source of
wealth in the district." Where there are gold and
rich companies there ought to be a market for our
National Academicians' pictures!

ords come to an editorial desk in all sorts of
forms. In letters, in manuscripts, in the
newspapers and magazines, in books, in
proof sheets, on photographs, in art announce-
ments. Sorted out, they rustle faintly in the pro-
cess of magazine making, sometimes to reappear as
some other words in the form of articles, book re-
views, editorial comments. Out of all these words
as they come to the desk originally may emerge
one or two that unconsciously link themselves into
a train of thought seeming to track its way over
many countries and a great space of time. Thus
the word "Canada" in connection with its pic-
torial art and the name of the late Willard L.

OCTOBER I925

seventy-three