FOREWORD
The Painters and Sculptors Association is a non-profit-bearing organization established solely to further interest in American Art, and to increase the sales of the work of the living American Painter and Sculptor. The Association is one of contributing artist members and subscribing lay-members, numbering about one hundred and fifty each. This membership is not local; the artists are from various regions extending from coast to coast, while the lay-group is composed of those interested in Art in all of the larger cities of the United States, and including Presidents and Vice-Presidents of ten of the great Museums, together with many officers and directors of these Institutions. There are representatives from New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Brooklyn, Rochester, Buffalo, Washington, D. C., Baltimore, Norfolk, Atlanta, Montclair, Newark, Cleveland, Canton, Dayton, Akron, Aurora, Chicago, Moline, Rockford, Joliet, Detroit, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, St. Louis, Kansas City, Denver, Los Angeles and San Francisco. This makes of the Painters and Sculptors Association a national organization in its extent and far-reaching in its interest. This makes it a clearing house and not merely a local sales place.
According to the plan of the organization of the Painters and Sculptors Association, each of the lay-members has pledged an annual subscription of six-hundred dollars for three years, thus providing for that period a subsidy. Each of the artist members presents to the association, as his membership fee, one of his works a year, for three years, this period having been agreed upon as a proper duration to test the practicability of the plan. At the end of the year each of the lay-members has the privilege of receiving one of the works of the Artist members.
Delano and Aldrich, architects, have designed and planned the Galleries, numbering at present fourteen. The galleries as they are now open to the public constitute the largest and handsomest salesrooms in either Europe or America, and there is no other place where the work of so many American artists can be seen or where the exhibit can constantly rotate and yet maintain its high standard of excellence. In the eleven months during which they have operated they have been visited by over 110,000 people. In this time it has been demonstrated conclusively that a sales place may partake of the excellence of standard, the beauty of installation, the atmosphere, the character, and the dignity of a modern museum and yet impart quite another form of message. Ownership, and the joy of possession, are the elements in the psychology of the Painters and Sculptors Association.
The Association is under the direction of seven men who are nationally known as business executives, and who contribute their time and experience absolutely without remuneration.
The sales during the past months have been most encouraging. A number of portrait commissions have been placed, while important paintings and bronzes were installed in leading museums.
The First Annual Exhibition, and several of the series of one-man exhibitions have been given and will be followed by more. Several out-of-town exhibitions have been held, when the number of sales was most flattering. Pictures were assembled and shipped from this gallery to Rome. Assistance was rendered the National Academy of Design, the Corcoran Biennial, and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, The Art Institute of Chicago, and The Carnegie Institute at Pittsburgh in their exhibitions this season.