The Auckland Star WITH WHICH ARE INCORPORATED The Evening News, Morning News, The Echo and The Sun. SATURDAY, AUGUST 3, 1936. A NATIONAL EVENT.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVII, Issue 181, 1 August 1936, Page 8

The Auckland Star WITH WHICH ARE INCORPORATED The Evening News, Morning News, The Echo and The Sun.

SATURDAY, AUGUST 3, 1936. A NATIONAL EVENT.

For the causa that lacks ussir.ianec, For the wrong that needs resistance, For the future in the distance, And the good that ice can do.

To-day, with the opening of the Dominion Museum and National Art Gallery, New Zealand, and Wellington in particular, achieve an ambition. There has been erected on the Mount Cook site (too long disfigured by an unsightly barracks) a national treasure house worthy of the Dominion. 'With the War Memorial Carillon, already familiar to visitors to the capital, the new building forms a group which gives to the city a distinction it has never before possessed. Within the Museum is housed historical material of all kinds which for many years was inadequately displayed—or not displayed at all —in a small wooden building that many a visitor to the capital has never noticed. In the Gallery arc to be seen the Empire loan collection, and the nucleus of a national portrait gallery.

It has been Auckland's experience that upon the erection of a museum commensurate in size and dignity with the city, its own citizens, and many others, both pakeha and Maori, throughout the province, were inspired and encouraged to present to it valuable relics of all kinds which otherwise would have suffered destruction. The arrangement of the exhibits, and the various services continually carried on by the Museum stair, are steadily altering the public conception of the purpose of such institutions. Wellington's experience will undoubtedly be similar. In addition to housing the collections and relies common to all museums, the Dominion Museum will become the repository of documents and articles of many kinds, now in private hands, but of national and historic interest.

With museums New Zealand is relatively well equipped; with art galleries it is not. The establishment of a National Art Gallery is indeed a belated recognition of the fact that "a nation is only as great as its art," and that workers in any branch of aesthetic endeavour, if their work is to be of permanent value, need both inspiration and standards. A great responsibility therefore rests upon the trustees, for upon their discrimination will depend in considerable degree the quality o£ the institution under their charge and the nature of the influence it will exert upon forthcoming generations. There will come a time when the fact that an artist's work has been accepted for the National Art Gallery will confer distinction upon him—or it will count for little.

Just as Aucklanders feel proud in being able to introduce visitors, whether from abroad or from within the Dominion, to the War Memorial Museum, so may they and all New Zealanders feel pleased that in the capital there is now a national institution which, architecturally takes rank at once as one of the finest of its kind in the British Empire. A museum, however, is not any longer to be regarded as a collection of curiosities, nor an art gallery as a place where old pictures are hung. Both are meant to be used, and both have a twofold duty—to the student and to the general public. Only if the institution opened to-day is used by the general public, and particularly by the growing generation, will the hopes ancl work and expenditure lavished upon it be recompensed as they deserve*