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hy Art Show Winner Won

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"THE SELF" by Noguchi

Noguchi was born and raised in this country but his ancestry is half Japanese, and in "The Self" he hints very subtly at that merging of Oriental and Occidental idioms which is so significant a trend in the art of the present day.

YOUR editorial raises its sights from the particular to the general in these lines:

"Historians of art are in fair agreement on what are its great moments. It strikes us that in all of these periods the purpose of painting and sculpture was readily comprehensible to most of the people. So were decoration and architecture.

"There were always, to be sure, pioneers and innovators not immediately accepted as they came to be later. But in its great days art was definitely a medium of communication between the artist and the people."

Forgive me if I remind you that in 1882 an authoritative French journalist, Henri Houssaye, spoke up for the people in not dissimilar terms: "Impressionism receives every form of sarcasm when it takes the names Manet, Monet, Renoir, Caillebotte, Degas; every honor when it is called Jean Beraud or Dagnan-Bouveret."

Today Beraud and Dagnan-Bouveret are completely forgotten, but Caillebotte's collection of his scorned fellows is regarded as one of the world's major art treasures.

MY POINT is that the great moments in the history of art about which the historians agree are often determined not by those who have an immediate appeal to the broad public but by those on whom the public heaps "every form of sarcasm."

An uninformed person reading your editorial might gather that Noguchi is a modernist of a very extreme variety. I wonder, however, just how far out he really is.

Twenty years ago he did the sculpture on the exterior of the Associated Press building in New York, and since then he has executed commissions for the Ford Motor Company, the Dole pineapple canneries, and a large department store in Mexico City. For all of these organizations, immediately comprehensible communication is an urgent necessity.

ALFRED
FRANKENSTEIN,
Art Critic,
San Francisco Chronicle.