FINE ARTS 1d

Nothing is harder to teach than a preliminary course. Too often, in a bid for publicity and popularity with those outside the field, the lecturer is not scholarly enough to be of any use to students concentrating in his subject. Such is the case with Fine Arts 1d.

Professor Edgell, with the reputation of getting out more words per minute than any other member of the faculty, covers all the art between the fall of Rome and the Century of progress exhibition in one hoctic half year. Everything within the field that might serve the cultured young gentleman socially, is skewered with a witty phrase or two (no copyrights). He emphasizes such abstruse, subjects as Sienese painting just enough so that the student can pose momentarily as an esoteric esthete, and gives just enough of the jargon of functionalism and modern architecture so that one need never feel ill at ease in the most angular of skyscrapers, or the most exclusive of modernistic salons. What is more, not merely does he display all these works of art, but he sells them to his class. The sleepy auditor is apt to wonder whether he is listening to the dean of the architectural school teaching Fine Arts, or Joseph P. Day auctioning off the Metropolitan Museum. Accordingly, this course is the dilettante's delight. For the socially ambitious sophomore who would charm the tea-tables of Brattle street, it is an unavoidable requirement.

Unfortunately, it is just as inescapable for the students concentrating in Fine Arts, though for a different reason. Naturally, Fine Arts 1d, essential to the cookie-pusher, is useless to the serious student. Too superficial in treatment to be of service, even as a background, it is nevertheless crammed down the throat of the concentrator, who emerges equipped with a multitude of prejudices of which he spends the rest of his college career ridding himself.

The only solution is to create a new whole course in the Medieval, Renaissance, and Modern art for those concentrating in Fine Arts, and limit 1d to those outside the field. Then the few that are chosen could work unhampered by the many that are called, and four out of five would continue to taste delightfully the Pyorrhean spring.