FOGG MUSEUM OFFERS MANY OPPORTUNITIES FOR STUDENTS TO LEARN APPRECIATION OF REAL ART

Art, Music, and the Drama are three methods of conveying and receiving emotion and intellectual stimulus which have played highly important parts in the history of civilization. The success of the Harvard Glee Club is one of the indications that at least some Harvard men are keenly appreciative of the possibilities of music. The 47 Workshop has a national reputation. And the increasing number of students who are devoting themselves to art in one form or another as a profession shows that they are sensitive to the changes that are going on in our society, and are preparing themselves to fill the positions as museum officials and art professors in the museums and college art departments that are springing up all over the country.

But though the students who are doing special work in all these fields are succeeding admirably, the question arises as to whether the average Harvard man who is going to be a business man, doctor, or lawyer wakes up in his college course to realize the opportunities which he has;--and which he is missing. We all know that it is easy to hear very bad music, and that it is also possible to hear very good music here in Cambridge. Surely an appreciable number of Harvard men have tried listening to both kinds. It is possible to listen to a Beethoven symphony in one evening. Can one get an idea of the art of a poet or a painter as easily? If the poet writes in a language foreign to us we must expend more effort than is needed to understand the music. In the case of art it is easy to spend an afternoon in the Fogg Museum and become acquainted with a number of masterpieces, for instance, the prints by Durer, Holbein, or Rembrandt. The work of Gainsborough who painted the now famous "Blue Boy" can be seen in his protrait of Count Rumford, recently bequeathed to the University. Anyone who wishes to know the works of art of some of these great men can do so in a much shorter time than it is possible to become acquainted with an equal number of the masterpieces of literature or music.

The effort has been made to collect for the benefit of Harvard students works of art representing the most significant periods of artistic activity in the world's history. It seems as if something in the nature of a powerful electric current has charged certain parts of the world with excessive vitality at different times which found its expression in Elizabethan England in the form of literature, in Germany in the form of music, and in Greece, France Italy and elsewhere in the form of architecture, sculpture and painting. The Fogg Museum Meleager, one of the finest original Greek statues in America, is an example of the abundant power and sense of beauty of the Greeks. And around this statue are grouped various other beautiful examples of Greek art, some earlier and some later.

Architecture as such is of course outside of the province of the Fogg Museum, but as sculpture was used in connection with architecture in many of the great buildings of the world, certain sculptured details from buildings serve admirably as illustrations of these sister arts. In the 17th and 18th centuries, the period of Dryden, Pope, and Addison, and of the pseudo-classic movement, the art of the Romanesque and Gothic periods was scorned and considered barbarous. In the 19th and to a still greater extent in the 20th century the enormous artistic value and signficance of this early work is understood more and more. The Fogg Museum has recently acquired some examples of Romanesque art which are among the noblest in America. These capitals were removed from their original places in the 12th century church by an architect in the 18th century who failed to perceive their beauty, and replaced them by work suited to the taste of his own time which the modern world agrees is far inferior. These capitals from the Church of Moutier St. Jean and some others from St. Pons are now to be seen in the entrance hall of the Fogg Museum.

Anyone who studies the history of painting seriously cannot ignore the Italian art of the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries. In fact most of the greatest painters of the western world appeared during these centuries. In the Fogg Museum may now be seen works by such men as Simono Martini, Lorenzetti, Fra Angelico, Pintoricchio, Vivarini, and Tintoretto, to mention only a few. These names of earlier artists are becoming better and better known and more beloved as the knowledge of art and taste progresses in the modern world. There are also works by later masters easier to understand, as the fine portrait by Van Dyck, the St. Jerome of Ribera, the so-called Rembrandt's Daughter by Turner, and the portrait of Count Rumford by Gainsborough. For those who are still more modern in their tastes there are oil and water colors by Winslow, Homer, Whistler, LaFarge, Dodge Macknight, and others.

East Furnishes Many Masterpieces

To our grandfathers the art of the east was almost a closed book. Now so many masterpieces from China and Japan have been discovered and brought to this country and so many students and artists have been profoundly influenced by the astonishing subtlety and sense of beauty of the painters of the east that the public is beginning to realize to some extent the magnitude of their good fortune in having the key turned and the door opened, showing us new possibilities of expression of human emotion. The Fogg Museum has a small but singularly beautiful and well chosen collection of Japanese prints given by Dr. Denman W. Ross of the class of '75; and a few other good examples of the art of the east, including the remarkable Cambodian head which would hold its own in any gallery in the world; and the Wetzel collection. Harvey E. Wetzel, of the class of 1911, arranged his collection, composed principally of Persian, Japanese, and Chinese works of art, in one of the rooms on the ground floor, just before he volunteered to go to Europe in the service of the Red Cross, where he died in October, 1918. The room is a masterpiece of arrangement. Each object is placed with reference to its neighbors, and each case in reference to the room as a whole.

The few oriental objects and the small collection of classical antiquities may easily whet the appetite of anyone who is sensitive to beauty and may lead the student to go across the river to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston where is one of the greatest collections in the world of Chinese and Japanese art, and also of Persian and Indian art, and where may be seen the best collection in this country of prints, of Greek, and of Egyptian art.