NOTABLE NEGLECT OF INDUSTRIAL ARTS.
A Plea for Arts and Crafts as the Logical
Basis of a National Development
of the Fine Arts.
In line with President Schurman's criticism of American culture is the plea by Charles de Kay, the New York art critic, for more attention to the industrial arts. His argument is that out of the arts and crafts the fine arts naturally develop; that out of the artist-artisan comes the highest class of artist, as, for example, Augustus Saint Gaudens, who began as a cameo cutter. To ignore the industrial arts is, so to speak, to leave out of count that solid middle class upon which alone the aristocracy of art can safely rest. Writing in the New York Times, Mr. de Kay says:
Plainly enough there is a field scarcely plowed at all in the arts and crafts. These arts in the Middle Ages, and latterly in Japan and India, absorbed and absorb the energies of the cleverest hands and brightest minds; but in America and England to-day are neglected for the fine arts, because the rare prizes in the latter, whether of fame or of wealth, dazzle the imagination.
Fashion rather than taste has set easel paintings so absolutely in the forefront that with most people this represents art in its entirety, and though the appreciation of the minor arts of Japan has opened the eyes and enlisted the sympathies of thousands, this one-sided view of art holds on; so encouragement of native arts and crafts is slack and uncertain.
Yet a democracy like ours, while the most difficult of all communities to rouse to a vivid sympathy with the industrial arts, owing to cheap processes and the influence exerted by traditions that began in aristocratic lands, is of all others that community where they are needed most.
The huge engine of the public schools is forever milling over the raw material of the Union, educating the native children, assimilating to the commonwealth the young people of immigrant stocks. The higher education of taste and refinement ought to go hand in hand, but it is sadly deficient.
No one should expect that the public-school system could add this to a task already appalling for its size and complexity. It can be coped with only by organizations apart from the existing schools, which might attempt for the youthful artisan what the art schools attempt for the training of architects, sculptors, and painters.
It is the fate of democracies to waste energy and attack each problem by the wrong side. Commend us to a democracy to put the cart before the horse every time! In the arts we have been doing this imbecile trick steadily, persistently, for a hundred years, trying to foster the fine arts while our minor arts and crafts are too contemptible for criticism.
Is it not about time to show that even a democracy can learn something? Certainly if we can convince this community that the most crying need is a thorough regeneration of the industrial arts, the object will be attained. For though democracies are often clumsy, when they once strike the right path they rush forward to the highest places with a speed and an irresistible force no other communities attain.