300 Attend Preview Of Art Exhibition

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31755, 12 August 1968, Page 12

300 Attend Preview Of Art Exhibition

About 300 guests packed a side gallery at the Canterbury Society of Arts gallery yesterday afternoon for a preview of a loan exhibition of “paintings seldom seen.” All the items—prints, water colours, oils, maps and miniatures—are from private collections. The society’s president (Mr S. E. Mair) thanked those who had lent items. The response had been so good that there was more than enough material available in Canterbury to hold several exhibitions, he said. Declaring the exhibition open, the Chancellor of the University of Canterbury (Bishop A. K. Warren) said he was pleased that the gallery was becoming the home of all kinds of arts, and such a useful meeting place. Bishop Warren said that an awful lot of “blah and nonsense” was talked about art often by persons who did not know just what they meant. The present exhibition was one which contained all sorts of paintings. It was up to the viewers to go around the gallery and select the items they particularly liked and then to immerse themselves in them.

Bishop Warren said the viewer could not just rest on the task of looking at paintings. One must make progress and try* to understand just what it was that the contemporary artist was trying to express. Often there was a conflict between what the artist wanted to express and what

the viewer wanted to see, he said. Included in the exhibition are paintings from England, the Netherlands, Spain, France, Greece, Italy and India. Among the artists represented are Gainsborough, J. W. M. Turner, J. McN. Whistler, Dame Laura Knight, and Sidney Nolan. A selection of English water colours has been lent by the Dunedin Art Gallery. A musical accompaniment to viewing announced by Mr Mair failed to materialise. A young woman was to have played classical Spanish music on a guitar, but an hour after the formalities were over there was no sound of mood music in the gallery.