ART
Art For and By the People
THE British Institute of Adult Education is going to do a good deal for art this year. It has already organised an exhibition of contemporary art at the City Literary Institute, which moved on to Leytonstone and was a great success, and it is proposing to hold nearly thirty exhibitions here and there during i94o. It is at the moment holding a show called " Art by the People " at the Connaught Hall, Torrington Square. What is intended here, as the preface to the catalogue puts it, is to " demonstrate a method in informal adult education," and the exhibitors include an expert teacher of dramatic art, a social service administrative officer, unem- ployed miners, a London vanman, a sailor, a small grocer and a Caledonian Market salesman. There are two dangerous attitudes to such an exhibition: ant, to imagine that by such means art-consciousness will be vastly increased, the other, to compare such products with the work of professional con- temporary painters, to the detriment of everybody. They are not naïve sophisticates exhibiting here, but simply people who have enjoyed themselves painting in their spare time, and are interested to show other people the results of their experi- ments, and infect some of them with the same enthusiasm.
Such an exhibition advertises these activities, and probably helps to provide new centres where people can get together under leaders who can give them inspiration—more important than teaching ; people for whom an art-school training in academic practice would be nothing but a bore or a waste of time. An academic grounding is the last thing to aim at : goodness knows, we do not need more professional artists. The thing to encourage—and it has been done with success— is that abandon of attack which children so often have, and so often lose. In this exhibition the least interesting section is the work produced in London County Council Evening Institutes. This is because the work is half-professional: the students have pretentions and the teachers have qualifications that prevent enjoyment from being the only real concern. It is a bit misleading to include a painting by Andre Bauchant in the collection, and to call him in the catalogue " French gardener." " Horticulturist " would be fairer. One might as well pop one of the works of Mr. A. E. Bunyard into a collection called "Essays by the People."
The attendance at the Institute's recent exhibition of " Art for the People " was over 9,000 in a month. The evening lectures (by Jan Gordon, Eric Newton and others) were so popular that the hall could have been filled each time twice. Many people were enthusiastic enough to stand in an ante- room where they could see nothing that was being shown and could hear only dimly what was being said, in an effort to find out something of the meaning of art. Now that it has been proved that there is a very large public that takes art in wartime seriously such exhibitions should have a single idea running through them. They should be put together so as to give people with almost no knowledge of pictures some idea of how to begin looking at them. Such people do not want to be able to distinguish between expressionism, impressionism, cubism and surrealism. They want to enjoy; they want to know why artists try to interpret life through patterns ; why all good pictures are not attractive impressions of nature painted out of doors on a sunny day ; why and how at least as much enjoyment can be got out of painting as out of music. These are all sensible questions to ask, and not only will a large public be the richer for simple answers to them but in time the artists will be richer, too. JOHN PIPER.
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