DIVORCING ART FROM LIFE

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXV, Issue 23020, 23 April 1938, Page 12

DIVORCING ART FROM LIFE

Two important considerations should be weighed before the Mayor's proposal to segregate the city's art collection in the Outer Domain is adopted. The first is that the city's great, open space has already been seriously encroached upon by buildings and traffic arteries. This exploitation of the common land has already gone too far and now there is a proposal to carry it further. The public should resist this expropriation of their property. A considerable area has already been alienated and the main paths of what should be a peaceful pleasaunce have been, or are being, opened to the roar of modern traffic. If the invasion be not halted now, will it stop short of fatal congestion of the city's lung? The second consideration is whether the art gallery will be well placed at a point remote from the city's heart. If art be regarded us a solemn thing — abstruse, exalted, lonely—well and good. If paintings are cold, dead things, only to be viewed on special and widely separated occasions, then by all means put them away in an attic or, in this case, place them apart in a mausoleum on a hillObservatory Hill. That would be entirely fitting. But if art is a living thing, bringing colour and light and inspiration into otherwise workaday and humdrum lives, then let the gallery be placed where it is readily accessible to all. The National Gallery stands in Trafalgar Square. The site value -at the heart of London and of the Empire must be enormous, but there is no proposal to shift the gallery to Hyde Park. The English like to hang their pictures where they can see and enjoy them ; they prefer to preserve their parks as parks. Entering the National Gallery is like plunging into a deep and still pool of beauty, an escape from the fret and noise of the hurrying world outside. Auckland's new gallery might perform the same healing and aesthetic mission, but not if it be forever quarantined in the Outer Domain.