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Transcribe page 33 of 34
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Download PDF for AAA-mccaeliz00033-000287 (project ID 41506)
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The Lachaise drawings, never before publicly exhibited, have been lent by Mrs. Lachaise, and together with loans of sculpture by Paul Strand, Paul Rosenfeld, Arthur Eggner and Lincoln Kirstein, point out an important relation between the graphic and the plastic arts. The particular quality of Lachaise's work one is apt to think of as being humanistic. Nevertheless he integrated in his work esthetic elements with human, a fact which may best be seen by studying the drawings. Indeed if we insist that a sulptor [[sculptor]] can not be a good sculptor unless he is also a good draftsman, we may be approaching an intellectual resolution of the problem of contemporary sculpture. Lachaise's drawings were powerful, direct statements of form, with every non-essential shorn away. In the synthesis of sculpture, he returned those subtle complexities he had discarded in his drawings; an interesting demonstration of how the creative mind works. Child art has for a quarter of the century been rising on a tide of progressive education. Some of our best painters do not hesitate to acknowledge their debt to child art for clarification of ideas. Water colors from 1880 to the present, on view at the Downtown Gallery until March 5, make a convincing case for themselves. During the general decline of taste of the General Grant era an illusion grew up in America that the value of a work of art was to be measured by its size in square feet, and the density and opacity of its paint. The still, small voice functioned no more in painting than than in poetry of the period. The donor of funds for a provincial museum expressed this conception when he wrote in his will that income was to be used for the "purchase of valuable and meritorious oil paintings." Yet in this dark age a rare artist like Winslow Homer could be found painting water colors which glow like a jewel with color, sparkle with the translucent quality of their medium, preserving inviolate the purity of the white paper. Earlier folk artists, such as the anonymous painter of Fruit in Basket of 1820, or Lucy Douglas with the Royal Psalmist, about 1810, were using the medium with an instinctive appreciation of its clean and lovely quality. It took, however, a XX century artist, Marin, to restore water color to the general esteem that it had held in ancient China. With Marin, the cavilers had to admit that water color is not an inferior or lesser category, that with great ideas expressed water color that can produce a great painting. Such an exhibition not only makes this point, but shows the wide-spread popularity of the medium at the present time—due, of course, to the pioneers who fought the battle for the recognition of water color. Pioneer in another field is Frank Lloyd Wright, "father of modern architecture." Carrying on the tradition of Richardson and Sullivan, Wright went on in his early work to develop ideas so radical for his time that no general acceptance of them could be found. It remained for Europeans to see the sound form of his "prairie style" houses of Chicago and [[image - a sculpture]] RATTON 14 rue de Marignan, Paris PRIMITIVE ARTS HEAD OF AN ANIMAL IN GREY STONE MEXICO TOTONAQUE Height 6 1/2 inches TWENTY-SEVEN
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