Sacramento daily record-union. [volume] (Sacramento [Calif.]) 1875-1891, 1885-06-18
A QUESTION OF TASTE.

picture has been rejected at the Loan
Exhibition in Los Angeles, which was ac-
cepted and displayed at the Sacramento
Loan Exhibition The incident of reiec-
ton by one and acceptance by another
committee simply testifes to the vitality
of an old questionable place of the nude
in art. There will be no end to the dis
cussion of the question so long as the tastes
of the people vary, as they always must,
unless indeed it is held that there may
come an age when art culture will be uni-
form among all the people. 1t would be
inaccurate to credit the position of one
class of critics with occupancy of any higher
plane of moral ideas than the other; that
is to say, is is not to be understood that the
association rejecting the picture at Los
Angeles has clearer moral perceptions than
the association which in Sacramento found
the picture unobjectionable from an art
standpoint. But there is justification for
saying that the art tastes of the Los An
SCiSo dH9oCIdtIoll are vi IL HuCH HdTTONeT
order. 1t has failed to look beyond the
physical, the sensuous, for art merit in the
picture. 1t has testified to a sensitiveness
Of modesty, but that does not bear witness
to its holding to a higher standard of pro-
priety than entertained by the California
Museum Association of Sacramento. Pru-
derry, we conclude, is evidenced by such
reflections as that at Los Angeles, as being
the chief element that influences the
Judges, however much and sincerely they
may deny that they are prudes.
That committee would find itself
sadly out of place in the London
National Gallery or in the Louvre, and in
an atmospere stifingly foreign to its views,
If it walked the halls of Dresden or the
art avenues of Florence In those and
similar repositories of art it will find that
tigure-painting is, in reality, but family
revealed to the people of the New World,
and that criticism of figure-painting moves
here oftenest upon exceeding low levels
There are but very few men or women of
all our millions competent to assume the role
ofauthoritative art critics--certainly neither
Los Angeles nor Sacramento can claim any
such. When local committees of inexpe-
rience set themselves up to determine the
question of propriety in art they are very
apt TO testify to their want of true art per-
ception. The better judgment is that of
the committee which gave the benefit of
any doubt it may have had To art, and not
TO prudery. The Sacramento committee
took this yiew-if it at all entertained
any doubts regarding the picture the Los
Angeles committee has continued to 50
successfully advertise. In short, the COM
mittee at Los Angeles may, without offense.
be adiudged as having acted, not from the
standpoint of art criticism, but from the
and its fearful estimate of what Z" the
world might say" in the second. Obvi-
ously this latter consideration should have
no place in the question, while the first is
of no consequence unless the committee
was Of high culture in art criticism 1t
would be interesting to know how the Los
Angeles committee of rejection views the
elegant works found in many of the homes
of that city, which present plates of the
treasures OF English art and representa-
lions of the chief pictures exhibited in the
international Exposition of 1878. 1t |
would be interesting to know how the !