HOW ROOSEVELT HAS HELPED ART

Dominion, Volume 34, Issue 137, 6 March 1941, Page 8

HOW ROOSEVELT HAS HELPED ART

A portrait of President Roosevelt as the patron of the arts was given by Professor Theodore Sizer, professor of history of Art. at Yale University, in an interview in Wellington yesterday. Professor Sizer said he gave Mr. Roosevelt the credit for taste, a quality rare in presidents. The New Deal, w'itli all its faults, had done an extraordinary job in assisting painters, seulptprs and architects.

They had had for the first time national and regional competitions which discovered latent talent. To the most promising artists commissions were given for mural and sculptural decorations in the great Government building schemes. One per cent, of the cost of all new public buildings was put into mural decorations; the result was that these buildings were fine and exciting. Artists must have sustained patronage. They could not live by hit or miss methods. They now had this patronage with work for the Federal Government because Roosevelt had put in charge of public building undertakings men of disinterested motives who had taste and knowledge.