LOVELY WOMAN.

Auckland Star, Volume LVI, Issue 289, 7 December 1925, Page 9

LOVELY WOMAN.

ART'S DISTORTED STANDARD. FAMOUS PAINTER'S ATTACK. The famous portrait painter, the Hon. John Collier, is responsible for a hold discussion in the Press on the standard of beauty of modern woman as interpreted by "advanced art." This "advanced art," he claims fas a plain man), is responsible for "ugly and monotonous pictures." With regard to the "caricatures" which pass for portraits he raises the point "whether we have really such a collection of freaks as the modern painters would make out?" Ugly Low Waist-Line. Naturally. Mr. Collier had to mention Mr. Epstein's "Rima," which has been installed in Hyde Park in memory of the naturalist Hudson. Some critics have pone into ecstaeies over this "monstrous perversion of the human form," but Mr. Collier hastened to say that "figures which give a low and bestial type of humanity are far worse than any silly arrangement of cubes and triangles," such as is practised by some of the young men of to-day. Mr. Collier goes on:—"In the history of fashion, especially female fashion, there have been all sorts of distortions of the human form which pass muster for a while as beauties. The tight waists and crinolines of the Early Victorian era, the bustles of a later period, in which we saw girls endeavouring to simulate the hindward contours of the Hottentot Venus, the curious fashion of the present time, when women's waists, instead of being where Nature placed them, are half-way down their thighs— all these things show how easily we can get to tolerate unwholesome distortions of the naturally beautiful female form." Effect on Race Future. Upon this point Mr. Collier receives the fullest support from Professor Arthur Thompson, the famous anatomical lecturer of the Royal Academy. He did not pretend to guess where the coming fashion would place woman's waist, but he ventured to point out that it was generally accepted that one of the failings of the female form was the shortness of the legs, and that the legs were made to appear very much shorter when the waist-line was lowered three or four inches. Mr. Collier is concerned because Britons marry girls because they lik 3 their look?. This works out very well for tho race so long as we have a proper standard of beauty, but if that standard is distorted so that we look with appreciative eyes on the women who remind US of the masterpieces of modern art, then Heaven help us! Should any of the young "highbrows" find any such women for the object of their affections, Mr. Collier hopes that "they will be as sterile in their matrimony as they often are in their artistic and literary activities."