Trouble' at the Tate ,
SIR,-1 should like to try to express what I believe are the feelings of the." average man," making little claim to art-education, but forming the great 'bulk of the population to whom, presumably, our artists intend to "make their appeal and by whom they expect to be underStood. I certainly feel, when productions like " Unknown Political Prisoner" by Mr. Butler are given the prize in an important inter- national competition, by those who are supposed to be able to guide us to what is best in art, that I am being got at," and I am angry - that a substantial prize should have been awarded to the artist; and that such things should .be placed in our public galleries, and I have great sympathy with the man who smashed it.
Why shoUld there be this want of understanding between artists of
the Butler school and the " average man" Why should we be so far from the spirit by which, to take only one instance, the people of Florence commissioned Ghiberti to produce his doors, and when, after years of work, it had hung them, commissioned him to produce a second pair, which, again after years of work, he did to the satisfac- tion not only of the people but of his artist contemporaries. Is it • not simply -that the Butlers are so intent on producing something of their, own disordered and twisted personality that they- have lost" the • inspiration which guided men like Ghiberti; men who each expressed' his own individuality, but who realised that it was but a small thing - in the vastness of the universe, and in humility drew their, inspiration from something they recognised as far above them ? The twentieth
century may have much in it of " mechanised brutality," but why
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