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Show THIS WE UNDERSTAND The following editorial appeared in a state newspaper recently to give Springville and members of the art board and art committee an incentive to continue in the direction in which the Springville. high school annual National Art Exhibit, has thus far been conducted. At the risk of getting tangled in the Modern Art controversy, this newspaper heartily congratulates the sponsors of the Springville Art Gallery ,on its 28th annual exhibit. Since pre-depression days, the Springville folks have been putting on their show in Utah's only real art gallery. Always they have hewed to the same line, emphasizing the traditional, the conservative, ignoring the sneers of the so-called modernists who blossomed out in such confusing con-fusing profusion in the thirties and forties. Now, it seems the Springville idea is winning out. Recently the National Sculpture Society released a formal statement state-ment branding the modernists as representing an "avowed negative ideology . . . dangerous, not only to art, but to the whole philosophy of national normalcy . . . victims of psychiatric delusions who torment themselves with visions of an agonizing, sordid, or abstract character .... spiritual distortions prepared to take advantage of any conjunction conjunc-tion for the sake of fame or notoriety." This is strong language, from a group which had long been silent. The society goes on: "Such an influence can but prove deeply deteriorating in a period in which American democracy is attacked from every angle by a philosophy phil-osophy of totalitarianism which has permeated nearly every country in Continental Europe. And in every country which fell a victim in this insidious ideology, modernistic art proved a most effective vanguard." We don't pretend to know about such things. All we know is that people keep coming back to the Springville exhibit because they understand under-stand and like what they see. And we know this too: that the Spi'ingville folks will never suffer the embarrassment of Vancouver, B. C, art officials who awarded first prize 'a few weeks ago to "Melancholia in the Swamp," a piece of cardboard on which commercial artists had cleaned their brushes, or of the officials in England who last year awarded a prize to a youngster who later confessed he let his cat do all the work. |