The Chairman, introducing the lecturer, said: The name of the lecturer is very well known to any who have an interest in contemporary art. I suppose there is no man now living who has painted so many portraits of the distinguished men and the beautiful women of this era. It would be difficult to find any crowned head, or any distinguished statesman or personality, whom Mr. de László has not painted. From His Holiness the Pope down to the latest king, the King of Greece, all are included in his gallery. A collection of his portraits would be of the greatest possible value to the historian of the present day, and they would be a marvelous tribute to the indefatigable industry which Mr. de László shows.

The following paper was then read:—

THE ART OF OUR DAY
By Philip A. de László, M.V.O.

May I begin by saying how greatly I appreciate the opportunity that has been given to me to speak to you to-night about the art of our day.

In any examination of the history of art, one of the first things to appear is that from time immemorial there has been between religion and art the most intimate alliance. Always the exponents of religious beliefs have sought the assistance of the artist as an interpreter who could visualize the principles of the creed which was being presented by means of words. But the artist, enlisted in this way in the service of religion, was required to make his work worthy of the mission which it was to fulfill. The best was expected of him and there had to be, in all that he attempted, a real spirit of reverence. It was recognized that, while he was the servant of religion, he was also its ally, and that his standard of performance must be as sincere and as earnest in its pursuit of perfection as that of the most devout believer in the creed which they both were striving to advance.

And, it must be said that in all the past civilizations of which we have knowledge to-day the artistic achievement which had as its purpose the glorification of religion has been of the highest rank, and has shown the spirit of the artist under its most convincing aspect. Look where you will—in China, India, Egypt, Assyria, Mexico, Greece or Rome—and at what you will—at the bas-reliefs of Assyria, the temples of Egypt or the art treasures of the Vatican—and you will find in them all a seriousness of intention and a loftiness of effort which are exceedingly significant. Certainly, it was the same devotion to a noble ideal that inspired the monumental work of Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel, and the Parthenon, that magnificent achievement of Phidias. Both of them were giving their best, because they held that only by the generous gift of what they felt to be their best, could they keep faith with the divinity in whom they believed.

Michelangelo, on his death-bed, said to his great friend Cardinal Salviati, “Two things I regret: firstly, that I have not done more for the well-being of my soul; and, secondly, that I must die while in my art I am still only learning to grasp the A B C.”

This desire to reach the highest has been, I repeat, the source of that vitality and that spiritual energy which have kept unbroken the continuity of art among all the changes that civilization has undergone. Just as in the ancient Pagan world it had power to stimulate the aesthetic activities of which so many evidences remain to-day, so on the advent of Christianity it became one of the chief means by which the realities of the Christian faith were made clear.

I do not think that I am claiming too much when I say that to this association of art with religion through many thousands of years we owe that absorbing search after perfection which is the supreme influence in the life of every true artist. From a vast array of predecessors, masters of their various crafts, there has been handed down to us a tradition whose authority is not lessened by the fact that its origin is lost in the mists of antiquity. We cannot depart from it now without sacrificing the essential qualities of art and, if it is divorced from this tradition, art is stripped of its principles and reduced to a purposeless sham. For, after all, what is the purpose that art fulfills in human life? Surely, to foster a desire for the best and to show how to find in nature the beauty that will satisfy this desire. I am a painter and, as a painter, I believe that my supreme duty is to worship nature and realize her truths as faithfully as I can. I say—with Keats—“Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty: that is all ye know on earth and all ye need to know.” I am anxious you should appreciate the full significance of this because I propose to speak very plainly about what is happening in these days to affect the spirit in which artists work.

We are living to-day in a material age, in times when mass production leaves no opportunity for the exercise of that individuality of effort which is one of the essentials of real artistic achievement. We restless moderns have no use for sentiment, and in the hurry and rush of our daily existence there is no moment allowed to us for contemplation or quiet thought. We are dominated by a craving for sensation and our whole outlook on life is ugly and distorted.

Is this striving after perfection for the glory of attaining it? Is this sordid materialism the spirit an artist should bring to his work? How would it be possible for him to claim that he is the worthy heir to a great tradition if, after the modern manner, he is mainly studying how to evade responsibilities and how to escape from discipline and restraint? And how can he hope to create the perfect work that is required of him if, to attain material success, he drags his accomplishment down to the level at which it will satisfy a debased popular taste?

Now, I am asking you to consider these questions because I am convinced that the answer to them is to be found in the condition of the arts to-day. I say intentionally “the arts,” as I feel that they all show symptoms of the same disease; but for the purposes of my arguments it will be sufficient if I limit myself to the art of painting, which is my particular concern. Look, I beg you, at the paintings which are to be seen in present-day exhibitions and tell me in how many of them you can discover evidences of earnest intention. Take your minds back to the art of those periods long past to which I just now referred—how much of its sense of serious responsibility survives in the works of what is called our modern school of painting?

I am much afraid that, in describing the majority of the productions of that school, honest comment would necessarily become exceedingly plain speaking. We should have to fall back upon such phrases as are used by the eminent French writer, Camille Mauclair, in some of his articles on our contemporary art. He declares that he finds in it “hatred of nature and of beauty,” “a passion for ugliness for its own sake,” and “an aggressive barbarism which transforms the human body into a scarecrow and nature into a nightmare”; and unhappily we often should have to agree that he is right when he dismisses so many of the artists of the modern school as “apostles of deformity, and negro-lovers.”

Frankly, I do not think that in what has come down to us from past civilizations you would be able to point out anything which would fairly be open to such attacks as these. Of course, you would find examples of primitive work, but they would be honest in intention and free from affectation. You would, here and there, come across quaint caricatures of natural facts, but that the motive in them was definitely humorous could not be mistaken. Also, you would see, often enough, natural forms conventionalized and reduced to a formal pattern, but these would be arranged deliberately to fulfill a clear decorative purpose. To say that in any of these there was a prison for ugliness or an intentionally aggressive barbarism would be untrue. Hatred of nature and beauty would be the last thing of which the artists responsible for such works could be accused.

No! With a feeling of distress I say it—now, at the end of the many thousands of years through which civilization has progressed, the degradation of art has been reserved for our time.

Yet, after all, if the great mass of ordinary men can be reproached for being ignorant and lacking in taste, is it really their fault? May it not be that for their deficiencies they are more to be pitied than blamed? Are they being given a fair chance? In bygone days the artists, by keeping their work consistently at the highest standard to which they could reach, showed the public what artistic effort could achieve, and accustomed the ordinary man to expect the best. Unconsciously he was being educated and helped to appreciation of the greater qualities in art.

But who is to reach him now? The artists are shirking their responsibilities and following where they ought to lead—offering to the public the trivial and ridiculous stuff which they think it wants and seeking to take advantage of its ignorance. Who can take their place? The writers on art? How many of them are capable of educating even the most willing learner and how many are genuine exponents of honest artistic principles? In far too much of what is being written about art today, I see nothing but ill-considered and inconsistent advocacy of wild theories, and even more intemperate adulation of erratic departures from aesthetic sanity.

One of the absurdities of modern criticism is the argument, which you will find put forth even in the most prominent newspapers, that the representation of nature is not art, and that a man is only to be counted as an artist when he evolves something from his inner consciousness, without reference to, or dependence upon nature. The less evidence of nature study there is in a piece of work, and the greater reliance it shows upon a morbid or ridiculous convention, the more artistic it is pronounced to be. In other words, art has to turn its back on nature; interpretation of natural truths which is given us by the observant artist who can show clearly how he responds to the impressions which nature makes upon him.

This argument, I repeat, is absurd, because art from its earliest beginnings has concerned itself primarily with the representation of nature. Art and nature are linked together by a bond which cannot be broken. It follows that the people who have no belief in nature as a teacher and guide are going after something which is not art at all and they must find some other name for the devices by which they pretend to express themselves.

What then is to be done to re-establish the authority of true artistic tradition? I cannot believe that art, with all the splendour of its long record, is destined now to sink into decay. Its state was better even in the Stone Age, when the cave man drew, upon the rocks that sheltered him, pictorial impressions of the world he knew. A savage he may have been, but he was by instinct a sincere student of his realities, and in dealing with them he did his best. We want to recapture his spirit, for it was the one by which all real effort has been directed ever since. The artist must begin by amending his ideas about the way in which he can legitimately express himself. It will do him good to go back to the cave man for some much-needed lessons in sincerity and simple directness of vision, but when he has learned these lessons he must look, for guidance in the way to apply them, to those master-craftsmen who have established the standard of technical achievement through the successive epochs of history.

The craft of painting has to be learned again to-day, because too many of our present art workers have forgotten that perfection of handiwork is unquestionably one of the greater essentials in all artistic practice and that, without it, the artist can never properly explain himself or make the meaning of his work reasonably clear. This was well put by Mr. Frank Rutter, the able art critic, in a recent article, when he wrote, “we can all agree that the best intentions will not redeem a picture that is pitifully poor in technical merit.”

One of the symptoms of the aggressive barbarism of which Camille Mauclair complains is the willful neglect of technical quality which is seen in so many of the modern works of art. The men who produce them no longer care to draw correctly, or to paint with any grace of handling; they do not study how to manage their materials; they make no attempt to observe subtleties of colour and tone relation, and they have adopted slovenliness of manner and method which is lamentable. Hence the feeling of repulsion which present-day paintings only too often excite.

The artists, as I have just said, should begin by setting their own house in order. But as soon as they have proved that they are genuinely anxious to reform, they have, I think, a right to expect that the intelligent layman will take his share in the educating of a wider public. But, of course, if he is to make the right use of the opportunity offered him, he must be in sympathetic agreement with the principle that the chief article in the artist’s creed is the seeking of perfection. In other words, he must acquire full power to discriminate between the men who deserve encouragement in their struggle to excel, and the pretenders whose earnestness is only a pose.

In the intellectual life of any civilized community art is one of the most powerful influences, and it is enormously important that this influence should be rightly directed. But now that the signpost which formerly pointed this direction has been thrown down, the people who depended upon it to keep them on the right track are left without guidance and have gone astray. So, if the intelligent men are not interested in art; if they, the leaders of public opinion, do not think it worth studying or understanding, can you be surprised if it falls into evil ways and if the painters—who have to make a living somehow—plunge into wild experiments in the hope that they will attract attention. So many modern works convey nothing to the uninitiated, and art which requires verbal explanation has failed in its purpose.

Now, I want to explain why, as a painter, I believe so strongly in the worship of nature. When did the art of painting have its beginning? I presume that the cave man, whom I mentioned just now, can be accepted as the founder of the painter’s art. At any rate he was, as far as we know, the first human being to make pictures and to represent in them the things he saw. He must have had both the faculty of observation and the power to memorize what he observed; and he developed a considerable degree of technical skill. To speak of him as a sincere student is fair enough; he obviously did study, or his memory would not have served him so well; and that he was sincere it is impossible to question, when we note the way in which he strove to realize what seemed to him to be essential facts. Really, the gap between him and the greater masters in art history is not so wide as one might think. Their intentions were much the same as his; it was in the greater skill with which they expressed themselves that their advance from his stage of development was mainly shown.

In this advance we can trace the evolution of the art of painting. It began with a plain statement of something seen and remembered. As it went on, this statement was embroidered and amplified, details were added to it, and imagination entered in. But this fuller elaboration did not induce in the masters any lessened respect for the authority of nature as a guide and teacher; rather did it make them more earnest and devout in their worship. So, you will see why, as a painter striving constantly for the completeness that I hope to attain, I remain a devoted lover of nature. But do not misunderstand me when I say this. I am not implying that I must confine myself to slavish and mechanical copying of the subject before me, or that I must never arrive at anything more than a piece of literal realism. What I do contend is that I must have close and intimate understanding of the mysteries of nature, because, until I have gained that, I cannot hope to translate correctly into the terms of imaginative art the beauties she reveals to me.

Let me illustrate this by an example. Take that supreme British master, Turner. His early studies were plainly the efforts of a man who was trying earnestly to accumulate experience and to secure a full control over the practical details of the painter’s craft. By producing a long series of such studies, he made himself a master of executive processes and then, on this safe foundation of assured craftsmanship and exhaustive knowledge, he proceeded to build up that marvelous achievement, as a poetic and imaginative artist, which gave him his unique position in the world of art. Yet he kept his cave man sincerity throughout, and his fidelity to nature as the source of his inspiration never changed or weakened. What his prolonged research had taught him was how to grasp the essential meaning of the subjects she presented and to depict that, rather than their merely superficial aspect. So, armed as he was, with superlative skill, he had the confidence to attack the most exacting pictorial undertakings and the ability to express the actual spirit by which nature was moved in the infinite variety of her manifestations. It was by this combination that he was able to reach the ideal truths.

Turner has shown us to what heights, beyond the reach of lesser men, the art of painting can be raised; his example of sedulous effort is one, however, that any serious artist is able to follow. In these days of revolution especially, it ought to be studied not only by the apostles of deformity, but also by those saner workers whose minds have not been perverted by false doctrines, but who need to be reminded of the duty which they owe to art, and to themselves.

There are, for instance, painters, well-intentioned enough, who approach their subjects with a preconceived idea of how these subjects should look. They have in their minds a pattern to which nature must be made to conform, and they try to show in their work not her essential beauty but the conventionalized version of her which suits their particular fancy.

There are, again, others who take too casual a view of their responsibilities; who seem to be under the impression that the supreme and final achievement of a Turner or a Velasquez—the eloquent expression of the artist’s whole personality—can be reached without the aid of that solid foundation of perfect craftsmanship which those masters laid with such infinite care, and to which their work owes no small part of its power to appeal.

That the slackness and irresponsibility with which the world is pervaded to-day should have produced artists of this type—not exactly bad, but sadly weak—is not surprising, but definitely, the habit they have of resorting to mechanical devices, like photography, to cover up defects in their training, cannot be excused. Such departures from the true line of development affect harmfully the art of painting and limit the scope of the artist’s practice.

Especially are they out of place in portrait painting, where a successful result depends far more than people generally appreciate upon the painter’s intuition and observation, and his ability to control the mechanism of his craft. He must be able to respond actively to the most diverse visual impressions and he must have an equally lively capacity to solve the widest diversity of technical problems. If his outlook is conventional and his handiwork unskilled, it is impossible for him to produce a great portrait.

What then, you probably want to ask, is it that makes a portrait great? It is not, I may say, the merely exact reproduction of the sitter’s face as it is seen by the artist in his studio—that is the kind of superficial likeness that a camera would give. It is a representation on canvas of the features of the sitter, but through the knowledge and intuition of the artist, there must be revealed in these features the sitter’s soul and all his potentialities of character and temperament. The picture must show us the spirit by which the human form is vitalized; and, besides, it must provide the sitter with the surroundings and atmosphere which are suitable to his personality and consistent with his state of life.

But, as it is only what the artist can see in his sitter that will appear in the portrait, the extent of this revelation will depend upon the degree of sensitiveness in perception which the artist possesses. Nothing will serve so well as to give him the necessary insight as confidence and sympathy between him and his sitter. The truly great portrait is the one in which this contact has been so close that is has spurred the artist to his highest achievement and to which, by tacit collaboration, the sitter and the artist have both contributed something vital.

May I instance some portraits in which I feel that this combination is convincingly illustrated? There is the magnificent ‘Nelly O’Brien’ by Reynolds, in the Wallace Collection. There are Gainsborough’s graceful ‘Morning Walk,’ Van Dyck’s ‘Earl of Strafford,’ the portrait by Frans Hals of a man and his wife, Raeburn’s ‘The Macnab,’ and those superb paintings by Velasquez, ‘Pope Innocent X,’ at Rome, and the head of Philip IV, in our National Gallery; and with these I rank some pictures that belong to our times—Sargent’s ‘Mr. Marquand,’ Orpen’s ‘Judge Moloney,’ Holl’s ‘Lord Overstone.’

These are conspicuous examples, but of course, you can find many more by masters of all periods which satisfy the most exacting demand. It is not because there is any lack of great portraits to study, that artists to-day so often fail to do themselves credit.

If, then, in the art of to-day there are signs of decadence, what is the prospect for the future? I, at least, hope that history is going to repeat itself. Look back at what happened in this country when the Pre-Raphaelite movement woke art out of the sleeping sickness into which it had lapsed; remember the revival in France after the fall of the second Empire, and the reaction that took place there against the illustrative art and neglect of fidelity to nature which had previously been in fashion. What our Pre-Raphaelites and the French impressionists, led by Manet and Monet, really undertook, was not the starting of a revolution to make a new art world, but the revival of the spirit by which such great realists as Velasquez, Hals, Chardin, Hogarth, Titian, Goya, Raeburn and Reynolds were consistently guided. When Manet broke away from the conventions of his time, it was to observe and record the real colours and tone values of nature. What the British and French reformers desired was to find better ways of expressing the ancient and immutable truths—the truths themselves they did not question.

But these reformers, with their sane outlook and temperate methods, were succeeded by a host of cranks and mountebanks, each one of them trying to go one better than the rest in the promotion of strange perversions and extravagant ‘isms,’ and each one claiming to have discovered something by which the whole aspect of art would be changed. This composition has led them at last, by successive downward stages, to the lowest.

So now the time is ripe for another revival and even now signs of its approach can be perceived. Students, I am glad to say, are beginning once more to appreciate the value of thoroughness and to interest themselves in qualities of draughtsmanship and technical expression, and in the work that some of them are doing now there is hopeful evidence of the growth of a sounder and healthier spirit than our art has known for a long while past.

And now may I ask you to be patient for a few minutes more, so that I can show you on the screen how the art of to-day compares with that which has come to us from the great masters of the past. The pictures I have chosen will speak more eloquently than any words could do, and will enable you to judge for yourselves by which spirit you would prefer the art of the future to be influenced and inspired.

DISCUSSION
The Chairman, in opening the discussion, said: We are all very grateful to Mr. de László, not only for his interesting lecture, which will provoke thought when we compare classical and modern art, but also for the pictures he has shown, and not least for his own portrait of Lord Reading.

It seems to me that there are certain conditions which should be observed in painting a portrait. First of all you have got to portray your sitter, that is to say, you must produce a likeness of him which people who have seen the sitter will at once recognise. If you cannot do that it is not a portrait; it may be a picture, but not a portrait. Then the artist must be careful not to caricature. I have seen some admirable portraits during the last few years in the Academy, many of them friends of mine, from which I turned away because I thought they were caricatures. It is a very easy thing to caricature, and not so easy to represent the sitter in his habit as he lived. One of the conditions which I think also necessary in a portrait is that there should not be arrested action. There should be repose. After all, the picture will probably be looked at for many years. Generations to come will look at it, and arrested action always leads the spectators to a sense of fidget and uncertainty as to when the action is going to be completed. A man who is just raising a glass to his lips, for example, is annoying, and fidgets. I begin to think, how long will it be before he drinks that cup of tea or glass of wine?

I think, too, that most artists represent their sitters without sufficient consideration as to the place in which the portrait is eventually to be hung. An artist should be told before he begins to paint a picture where the light is coming from, either from the right or the left, and so on, so that he may make his picture to fit its future home. One other thing which I think is very necessary for the making of a great picture is to ascertain whether the picture is going to fill a place in the home of the family or to occupy a position in some official residence. In the former case you would naturally paint the sitter in the costume which he would generally wear at home. You would not represent him dressed up as a general or an admiral, because he does not in his home go about in that dress—except perhaps in Hollywood, where these things are expected. If, on the other hand, the picture is going into the official residence of a former viceroy, for example, you would naturally wish him to represented in the uniform which he would have worn on certain great official occasions with which he was connected.

During the course of his lecture Mr. de László pointed out that one of the necessities in painting a portrait is that you should give not only a likeness, and a pleasant one, of the sitter, but that you should also express his character in his face. That I think must be the most difficult task of all, because a man does not always show his character I his face. You must read the Dictionary of National Biography or Who’s Who, or be well acquainted with the sitter, to find out exactly what the character of the man is. It would be difficult to represent the face of a man who does not show at all the particular traits in his character which are known to a certain number of his intimates.

I am invited occasionally to go to some of the modern galleries where some of these modern art pictures are exhibited, and I always come away wondering whether the artists are not really trying to pull my leg. They seem to me to be trying to see how much the public will stand. Many of their paintings and drawings appear to me absolutely childish. They seem to be the work of children who have had a brush or pencil put into their hands and been told to draw something, and they do draw something, but it is not in the least like nature. The houses are all on one side, as though there was an earthquake going on, or you get the two eyes on the same side of the face. I cannot believe that these pictures really attract the public. If they go there they go to laugh, and I think Mr. de László has rather exaggerated the part these pictures play in the artistic life of the nation. We must remember always, however, that every great master was ahead of his time. If it had not been so we should have gone on always in the same old rut. It may have been a very good rut, but we should always have pursued the same line in art, and it is only where you get a master that realizes that what he has done does not fully represent nature as he sees it, and only where you get him starting on his own line and breaking into something new, that you get great advance. I quite agree that in many cases the advance goes in the wrong direction and leads into a cul-de-sac. For instance, when Manet, to whom Mr. de László referred, first began to paint, his pictures were looked on in France as ridiculous. They were not admitted into the Salon, and when Manet invited the Empress Eugenie and the art critics to see them they all burst out laughing. I think I am right in saying that during his life-time Manet never sold a picture at all. But his art was disfigured by vulgarism, and that is one of the things to be particularly avoided. Extravagance and vulgarism would kill any picture.

Mr. F.C Tilney said: I should like to add my tribute of gratitude for this most stimulating lecture from Mr. de László. This is a great day for good art, almost epoch-making, because it is very seldom, in fact I think it has never happened before, that so distinguished a member of the art profession has had the moral courage to stand up before an audience such as this and to speak with frankness and fairness his very innermost thoughts and feelings. All true artists have these thoughts, and the more exalted of the profession have many opportunities for giving voice to them, but do they ever do so? I think you will find that on almost every occasion when such an opportunity presents itself, the matter fizzles out in compromises and complimentary loopholes. Mr. de László has boldly said what he thinks about modernistic art, and its comparison with the traditional art that is happily still with us.

Mr. de László considers that the artists are themselves to blame. I have heard that many times. People will tell you that in confidence. Painters, for the most part, cannot sell their works for the reason that public interest in art has reached a state of atrophy. The public, being puzzled, washes its hands of the things it does not understand. Artists certainly have themselves to blame because, had they at the outset made a proper stand against incompetence, they could have prevented the present degradation. That is the opinion of many men, and of most of the Academicians themselves. When Roger Fry brought his post-Impressionist Exhibition over here it was not accepted with favour by anybody. The Press and the public execrated it. But it was a sensation, and nothing succeeds financially like a sensation. So the matter was taken up by the press, and Mr. Fry himself was a great advocate for this cult of the ugly and it became ‘the rage.’ If at that moment the supreme art institution in the country, the Royal Academy, had protested, it would have been listened to. The Royal Academicians would have been regarded as the final authorities. But they were too dignified. They took the attitude of ignoring such nonsense which, they implied, would pass in a few weeks. It has not passed. It is still with us. The Chairman considers that its importance is over-rated. Anybody who goes round the studios will find that among serious artists it is thought to be vastly important.

The materialism that Mr. de László alludes to may be interpreted as commercialism, and it is commercialism which keeps ‘modernists’ alive. Art and Commerce are not really partners. If Art flirts with Commerce it generally deteriorates in its morals. It is perhaps heresy to say as much in these sacred precincts, because the Royal Society of Arts admittedly supports Art and Commerce. The two may work together, certainly; but Art at its purest cannot possibly have anything of the commercial in its incentives. The artist is of course glad to have money, because he must live, but the payment does not inspire the true artist, although his work may be exploited for commercial ends. It can be made a craze, a sensation; it pays the exploiters very well.

We must not lose sight of the fact that new art-movements are only fashion; and the public does not ask for new fashions in anything. The fashions are set to the public, not by the public. The fashion now is for distortion and incompetence, and anybody, whether he has been to school or not, can pose as an artist, because it is fashionable to do so. How in such dreadful conditions is the real artist to be encouraged? I do not know how to express my gratitude to Mr. de László for bringing this subject right into the arena, and I hope this will not be the last meeting of its kind. As a rule, public speakers of eminence are indifferent to the subject.

Mr. Frank O. Salisbury, R.P., said: I should like to congratulate Mr. de László upon his most able and delightful lecture. It is about time that the artist spoke out in a manly and courageous voice, and we are all indebted to the lecturer for his magnificent address. I should also like to add my appreciation of his portrait of Lord Reading which was shown on the screen. Had he only painted that one picture he would have ranked as a great master.

The Lecturer, in reply, briefly expressed his appreciation of the kind remarks which had been made by the two speakers, and thanked the chairman for honouring them with his presence that evening.

On the motion of the Chairman a hearty vote of thanks was accorded the lecturer, and the meeting terminated.

[Editor's Note: The article was accompanied by the following illustrations 

Notes 
Special thanks to Matt Davies, of Kansas City, a friend of the JSS Gallery for this submission.

From: Matt Davies
matt da  vies@jssgallery.org   
Date: Nov 12, 2005

Attached is a Word document version of "The Art of Our Day," by Philip A. de László, as reproduced in The Journal of the Royal Society of Arts, August 7, 1936, pp. 996-1011. The article is an interesting read for the opinions of de László and the members of the Royal Society of the Arts regarding the "modern" art of their day.

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