A HOME FOR THE FINE ARTS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVI, Issue 20323, 2 August 1929, Page 12

A HOME FOR THE FINE ARTS.

A promising plan for concerted action, on the part of the City Council and the University College, with a view to giving Auckland a worthy home for the fine arts, received a tentative welcome at a meeting of the council last evening Its Library Committee has been directed to report on a suggestion that the council and the college should confer on the proposal. Some time ago, the Society of Arts, which has looked with hope deferred toward its possession of a building suitable for its needs, approached tho council with a scheme for joint occupancy of one housing the public art, callerv and the society's activities. The scheme had much to comment it. On its part, faced with an urgent necessity to provide adequate accommodation for the gallery apart from the library, which has needs of its own only to bo met by the removal of the gallery t-o separate premises, the council required little persuasion to look favourably on the idea, as it included financial aid from the society. As for the society, the prospect of a happy settlement of its housing problem fully justified its proposed share of responsibility. Good as the scheme was, the one now under consideration is better. It has all the merits of the one it displaces, for it envisages the solution of the difficulties facing both tho council and the society, and in addition it links up also the interests of the university college and of other institutions with artistic aims. In the bold comprehensiveness of the idea is its prospect of success. To have one central home for the fine arts of the city—its public gallery, its university faculties of architecture, music and painting, its recognised society for the promotion of artistic appre ciation, and other institutions of kindred purpose —is an aim calculated to capture the imagination and enlist practical assistance. There are matters of business to be considered, and care for these must have a place at the very outset. But no insuperable obstacles appear, and these matters should all prove capable of satisfactory handling. Thanks are due to those who have put forward the general scheme, the embodiment of which in a building such as they have conceived would be a very notable achievement in the intellectual and aesthetic progress of the city.