MODERN ART.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIV, Issue 290, 8 December 1933, Page 9

MODERN ART.

ADDRESS BY MR. J. W. SHAW

Modern art was the subject of an address given by Mr. J. W. Shaw at a lunch of the Auckland Society of Arts yesterday. "There is no definite art," said Mr. Shaw. "We cannot say this or that is the filial word on art. A poet shows a beauty that is not apparent to others, and the artist catches the scene at the moment when beauty is greatest."

Mr. Shaw said that art was an escape from reality—from the cold miserable R-orld, but it was not escape from life. It was an opening up of a new and fuller life of higher beauty. Art could not be divorced from life, arid it could not live for art's sake alone. There were two ideas in art—Conformity to pattern and accepted criteria, and the Romantic conception of self-expression.

.Mr. Shaw referred with contempt to the "modernists," and said that people were afraid to criticise modern works for fear of being accused of not being modern. He referred to the works of T. S. Eliot as being art-example of the modern tendency.

"I believe," said Mr. Shaw in conclusion, "that we arc on the verge of a'return to classicism, and the Victorian era will, one day have justice done to it."