The Christchurch Star TUESDAY. MAY 28, 1935. DON QUIXOTES IN ART.

Star (Christchurch), Volume LXVI, Issue 20625, 28 May 1935, Page 8

The Christchurch Star

TUESDAY. MAY 28, 1935. DON QUIXOTES IN ART.

PUBLISHED BY New Zealand Newspapers Ltd.

'Y\7'ITHIN a limited compass the ’ * propaganda for the development of public taste in objects of art is well received in the cities of New Zealand, and Christchurch takes itself as seriously as the rest. But the Spanish people give the propaganda of culture a Quixotic touch and call it the “ propaganda of joy.” There they understand the suffusing of art appreciation through national life perhaps just a little better than we do. Madrid has a special department of “ missionaries of culture” in the Ministry of Education, from which young teachers are sent out to tour the country districts with little theatres or museums or art galleries, cara-van-wise. In quiet, remote villages the arrival of the “ mission ” is made a colourful enough event to attract the peasants, and the tradition of Spain’s great cultural past is thus penetrating hack to the soil. It is perhaps too often forgotten how much of what is taken for granted in the cities of New Zealand would be appreciated and pondered in the smaller towns here. For, though New Zealand as a whole suffers from a consciousness of cultural isolation, this feeling is most acute in the small centres. And it is the cultural dearth in the country that must be regarded as the largest factor in holding back the development of national appreciation and expression in art.