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ART AS A HARD-TIME OPPORTUNITY.

By Henry Willington Wack
(President, Brooklyn Society of Artists).

Art is the most tenacious record of mankind in the history of the world. When all else perished, Art alone remained of every ancient civilization. There is an internal quality in art which appears to defy its extinction. When Rome fell, her Art escaped into the world at large to glorify Roman achievement, to carry on the traditions of classic architecture, the inspirations cathedral frescoes, anatomical design, human beauty and the spiritual significance of great paintings and sculptures. These are the only heritage the modern world gained as one ancient civilization after another disappeared. The material things, the purely utilitarian objects with which early races carried on the mechanical process of living, disappeared in the dissolution of spent cultures, defunct nations, dead kingdoms. Only their arts survived sufficiently to reveal to us that such civilizations once existed.

That eternal quality which enables Art alone to live in the midst of material death, is the same tenacious element which drives striving and neglected genius to do its inspired work. Nothing is so abominably neglected, so cruelly maltreated in our civilization, as the productive talent in the creative arts. Yet in spite of all of this, art persists not only in its expression, but in its insidious influence upon the ideals of resisting mankind. Art goes right on functioning inexorably in spite of man's disdain, in spite of the short, hard, wretched life suffered by artists throughout the world. I daresay this then one percent of the creative genius living and at work today enjoys a normal portion of the world creature comforts. All the rest persist in the practice of their art in the midst of poverty and want.

I think there is something divine in all of this – something of the actual life of Christ. Great art is seldom begot by ecstasy, or by its more passive relative – human happiness. Great Art would seem more frequently to be the child of suffering;