DOMINION ART

Evening Post, Volume CXIII, Issue 130, 3 June 1932, Page 8

DOMINION ART

TWO KINDS OF CRITICS

SCOPE FOR NATIONAL CHARACTER

"The rising quality of the work on those walls as year follows year attests thd progress of our art, and we cannot praise our artists too much for their share in keeping alive in this country the things of the mind and of the spirit, without which we might be rich but never could be great," said Dr. J. S. Elliott when opening the autumn exhibition of the Hew Zealand Academy of Fine Arts last night. In New Zealand, he added, we were as yet far from the meridian of our art, but had in rich profusion the scenery and the colouring for a form of art national in character, and our artists had the will and the power to succeed.

Touching on the subject of criticism, Dr. Elliott remarked that there were two kinds of art critics, the inspired amateur, who was no judge but knew what he liked and disliked, and the other kind who knew what to like. Eeal criticism of a picture was an art, like painting itself, and required long training, much experience, intellect, and, above all, sensibility and feeling. He referred to the well-known picture by Sir Luke Eieldes—" The Doctor," which, he said, shared an honoured place with "Phar Lap" in many homes and provided a distraction from the pictures on hire from Hollywood. "I cannot speak," he said, "with authority like an art critic, but merely I trust with common-sense, when I say from purely the physician's point of view that the medicine bottle on the table in the picture of 'The Doctor1 is much too large to have been ever ordered for a child, and the bedside manner of the doctor is open to objection, for the elbow which supports Ms tired, massive, and unusually hairy head is not resting on his knee, which the artist hoped for, but on the dying child. -• ■•>-*> "There was never a picture that was painted, however bad >in design or! execution, that cannot be praised in some way, either for its strength or else for its restraint, for its atmosphere or at the very least for self-ex-pression," Dr. Elliott added. "As for the pictures of the ultra-modern school, they strike us speechless, or perhaps we can murmur: 'I should nwer haye1 thought that it was what it is.' "