"BOSTON IS MODERN ART PAUPER"--BARR

The following article was written especially for the Crimson by Professor Alfred H. Barr, Jr., of the Wellesley Fine Arts department.

It is surprising, even shocking, to the stranger to find so little interest in Modern pictures in Boston and Cambridge, places which have a deserved reputation as centers of alent cultivation of the Seven Arts. One may search in vain for the works of the foremost living painters in the Boston Museum, in Fenway Court, or in the Fogg. Neither Matisse nor Bonnard, Picasso nor Derain is to be found in these three more or less comprehensive collections, save in a few prints and drawings. It is even more astonishing that the great founders of the contemporary tradition--men who have been dead twenty years are equally neglected. It is actually impossible for an amateur to study in any of these great galleries, a single painting by Cazanne, Van Gogh, Seurat, Gauguin, masters who are honored the world over--in London, Paris, Berlin, in Italy, Russia, Scandinavia, in the Low Countries, in Chicago and New York and Cleveland--but not in Boston. One must actually travel to Worcester to see paintings by Gauguin and Redon. In Boston, the development of 19th Century painting is half-heartedly illustrated through the Impressionist period. But after that we find only such fashionable virtuosos as Zuloaga and Sargent. Scripture after Rodin is almost equally neglected.

Fogg Needs Money and Room

The Fogg Museum with hitherto very limited space and funds has not been party to this spirit. Its splendid collection of drawings is carried through to Picasso and in the new Museum there is to be ample room for contemporary expression,

In the Print Room at present is an exhibition of recently acquired facsimiles and photographs published by The Dial in 1923. There are paintings in oil, water colour, and tempera, drawings in crayon and pencil reproduced so miraculously that under glass it is impossible to detect them from originals. Picasso is there, Bonnard and Matisse, Vlaminck and Signac, and the Americans, John Marin and Charles Demuth, three of whose watercolors the Fogg acquired several years ago.