HOUSEWIVES' PAINTINGS
SIR,—As the Organiser of the National Exhibition of Housewives' Painting, which is by the way a selection from some 8,000 pictures submitted re- cently for a painting competition adjudicated by Sir John Rothenstein, Professor Gilbert Spencer, ARA, and myself, I would be grateful for the privilege of challenging just one aspect of Mr. Basil Taylor's extraordinary review of this exhibition. ('Amateurs Anonymous,' September 13.)
In seeking to equate the social phenomenon of modern pleasure painting (the new European 'folk painting') with the art of the great individual masters of the past, in attempting to measure the generality of the one against the particular standards of the other, Mr. Taylor has mounted such a ludicrous horse that one is bound to wonder what his qualifica- tions for the role of art critic really are. This is a preposterous platform from which to review the painting of a housewife!
Mrs. Snooze might even feel thrilled that the art critic of a great journal should find her wanting when compared with 'the identity of a nineteenth- century master . . .'; but among experts the com- parison is so stupid, so priggish, that it fails to make any sense at all.—Yours faithfully,
MERVYN LEVY
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