ARTISTIC HOARDINGS

Evening Post, Volume CV, Issue 107, 7 May 1923, Page 7

ARTISTIC HOARDINGS

GALLERIES OF THE PUBLIC.

(»NITE» PRBSS ASSOCIATION.—C»PIRIi«T.)

(AUSTRALIAN . NEW ZEALAND CABLE ASSOCIATION.)

" . _ - LONDON, sth May. The Prince of Wales was the principal guest at a Royal Academy banquet. Referring'to-his recent tour of the battlefields and the beauty and dignity of the graveyards of British dead, the Prince said that a decadent race could never have produced the men who lie there; equally, a decadent race could never have so fittingly perpetuated their memory. In the opinion of many the war has left the average man more sensitive, to artistic suggestion.' The Prince said that he did not for a moment believe that industrial and artistic development were necessarily antagonistic.

"We' have justly 'resented the inference sometimes drawn from Napoleon's epigram that we were a nation of shopkeepers, that because we keep shop successfully we neglect our shop windows, and that, because we have commercial shrewdness we are totally unappreciative of art," he said. "Our hoardings might now bo called without exaggeration, the art galleries of the great public. Many of the greatest successes of these hoardings are reproductions of pictures which have hung in tWo Eoyal Academy: Advertisements are now a necessary adjunct to business life, and their refinement has advanced so as to justify their description as artistic, and their influence in bringing colour and decoration' to otherwise grey and monotonous streets is not to be despised.''