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Making the Visible Arts Visible in North Carolina Author(s): William Polk Source: Social Forces, Vol. 4, No. 3 (Mar., 1926), pp. 535-538 Published by: Oxford University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3004728 . Accessed: 14/06/2014 22:14 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . Oxford University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Social Forces. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 62.122.76.60 on Sat, 14 Jun 2014 22:14:12 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Making the Visible Arts Visible in North Carolina

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Page 1: Making the Visible Arts Visible in North Carolina

Making the Visible Arts Visible in North CarolinaAuthor(s): William PolkSource: Social Forces, Vol. 4, No. 3 (Mar., 1926), pp. 535-538Published by: Oxford University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3004728 .

Accessed: 14/06/2014 22:14

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Oxford University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Social Forces.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 62.122.76.60 on Sat, 14 Jun 2014 22:14:12 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Page 2: Making the Visible Arts Visible in North Carolina

TEACHING AND RESEARCH 535

At the other extreme is Texas with i

Nebraska 3, North Carolina 4. It is evident from a glance at the map that some half-dozen institutions grant three- fourths of all doctor's degrees in the social sciences.

Dividing the United States into regions characterized by similar social and eco-

TABLE I

DISTRIBUTION OF PH.D. DEGREES IN PROCESS I920-I924

AND THEIR UNDERGRADUATE COLLEGE BY REGIONS

Ph.D. A.B.

Number Per cent Number Per cent

Colonial ...........2.X, OI 5 56.0 I,2 27 37 .0 Middle West ....... I, I39 3I .7 975 29.8 Southern .......... 5i I.5 2.66 8.2. Northwest. III 3.2. I39 3.8 Prairie ............ 3 0 i6o 4.8 Southwest......... I4 0.4 2.06 6.6 Range ..... .......0 0 62. 2..I

Pacific ............ ,o6 57 2.03 6.o District of Colum-

bia........ 53 I.5 55 1.7

Total .. ... 3,592- I00.0 33,I88 ioo.o

nomic aspects such as used by The Institute for Social and Religious Research in its studies gives the distribution as in Table I. This reveals that 56 per cent of doc- toral degrees are granted in the Colonial region, and 3I.7 per cent in the Middle West. The Range region has none, and the Prairie only 3 studies under way. A total of 87.7 per cent of all the doctor's

degrees are given in the Colonial and Mid- dle West regions, while the Range, South- west, Prairie and Southern regions account for only I.9 per cent.

With the 3592. doctoral dissertations in process in the social sciences for i92.0-I92 4

as the basis of judgment, the distribution and location of the undergraduate degrees of these doctoral candidates was studied. A total of 33i8 bachelor's degrees was recorded by 3 8o American colleges and universities, I03 by 4I Canadian, io6 by I3 foreign, 2.7 by educational institutions not located, and in 38 cases no A.B. degree was listed. Only undergraduate degrees from American colleges were plotted on the map and tabulated.

The largest number of bachelor's de- gree background for the doctorate, is found in the Colonial area, namely, 37 per cent, which is followed by the Middle West region with 29.8 per cent, the South- em 8.2 per cent, the Northwest 3.8 per cent, the Prairie, 4.8 per cent, the South- west 6.6 per cent, the Range 2.i per cent, the Pacific 6.o per cent, and the District of Columbia I.7 per cent.

The range by states of A.B. degrees of those who are candidates for the doctorate in social science is from 4i6 New York, 310 Massachusetts, 2.7o Illinois, 265 Penn- sylvania, to none for New Mexico, Nevada, Wyoming, and Vermont. Five states show less than five candidates for the doctorate.

MAKING THE VISIBLE ARTS VISIBLE IN NORTH CAROLINA

WILLIAM POLK

T BHE fine arts in the South have been so long bedizened with the tinsel of Isentimentality,-a matter of

mocking-birds and broken hearts, lambs

and cupids,-that a healthy prejudice has sprung up against them.

Nevertheless, the time has come for North Carolina to welcome the visible

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Page 3: Making the Visible Arts Visible in North Carolina

536 SOCIAL FORCES

arts into its life, without any overwhelm- ing sense of shame. After all, the Athens of Pericles and the Florence of Lorenzo were civilizations not to be sneezed at,- even by people with bad colds. The Parthenon in Athens is the product of a civilization that had something, and the Governor's Mansion in Raleigh is the product of a civilization that lacked some- thing. And that something is what we call art.

The high calling of the artist is to make "what is spiritual seem as simple and natural as sunlight or the sea," and to do that without descending to the laziness of symbolism or allegory. His business is to make the spirit in matter speak to the spirit in man. The David of Michael Angelo is a certain marble man, but it is more than that. It is Youth, confident Youth, going forth to conquer the world. The Pieta, that figure of a woman seated, with her hands stretched out at her sides and the body of her dead son in her lap, is more than a woman. It is the whole of humanity confronted with the sad and inexorable mystery of death. No man can say where the marble stops and the idea begins. They seem to be the same thing. So Leonardo could put the mystery of existence in the droop of a young woman's eyelids, and Rembrandt could put it in the crook of an old woman's finger. The great artist finds matter miraculously capable of expressing his spirit,-his thoughts, his emotions and even those in- tuitions that are deeper than thought, as profound as life itself, beyond the reach of the philosopher and the scientist and seizable only by the artist in his appeal to the spirit through the senses.

The men who could do these things,- their works are worth any people's seeing, if only in copies that catch some faint reflections of their "far-off brightness."

This question of art is not divorced from

the life of the State of North Carolina, but it is most intimately bound up with its immediate development. What Ed- ward K. Graham said is everlastingly true: "The life of an active people is in- complete without beautiful expression."

This State, most especially at this phase of its development, needs that "beautiful expression." North Carolina today is plastic. The clay of its civilization, which was moistened by the blood and tears of the Civil War, has been kept wet ever since by the sweat of hard labor, so that today it is still ready to be moulded according to the heart's desire of its people, or merely left a lump. The life of much of this country has crystallized. But there runs through all of North Caro- lina a fresh life, bursting out in new fac- tories, new public buildings, new homes, new churches, new roads. There is growth, expansion, development. It has behind it the powerful push of some sixty years of poverty, self-denial and hard labor. After half a century of struggle to exist at all, North Carolina has at last a chance to make its existence about what it pleases to make it.

There is no doubt that this growth will continue. The question is whether it will be a growth directed by good taste as well as good sense,-a growth in sight- liness as well as in size.

The answer obviously is that it will not be, unless the feeling for beautiful things, the knowledge of them and the desire for them,-such things as we must look at every day of our lives, streets, houses, stores, yards, landscapes,-is developed among the people, and especially the children, of the State.

If we were not kindly blinded to the fact by its commonness, we would see that most of North Carolina's towns and cities are not models of loveliness. In many of them, an ordinary billboard

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Page 4: Making the Visible Arts Visible in North Carolina

TEACHING AND RESEARCH 537

would appear, by contrast, positively beautiful. In a climate that will foster almost any sort of a tree, shrub or flower, we fail to plant them or, once planted, take pains to cut them down. We have more cause to boast of the climate than the climate has to boast of us.

Not that this ugliness pierces our es- thetic sensibilities. We unconsciously re- fuse to look at it. Consequently the streets of our towns, bristling with tele- phone posts, bare of trees and sizzling in the summer sun by way of looking city- like; our village houses, grimy or painted a Seaboard Air Line yellow; our country stores with their porches of rust-eaten, corrugated tin held up by a few warped scantlings, scrouging just far enough off the railroad track to prevent the cow- catcher from taking off the weather- boarding,-and all with about as much order and beauty as the back lot of a Ford Garage,-this, it is true, gives us no pain. But it can hardly give us much pleasure. Of too many places in this State it may be said that there is

Nothing here Of conscious plan to lift the spirit up.

All this is changing? Perhaps. Here we are creating a new civilization, re- building an old commnonwealth, but there is nothing to assure us that the old ugliness will not be supplanted by a new ugliness. We still face the danger that a civilization created by a people without a widespread feeling for beautiful things will be mis- shapen and deformed.

The plastic and the graphic arts, be- sides serving to make the visible life of this much-loved State more lovely, should hold yet another value: the development of the latent creative artistic ability in the State. If there are potential painters, sculptors, architects in North Carolina,- and there are, and they are being wasted,

the sight of beautiful things that other men and women have made and that are worthy of immortality simply for the sake of their own "victorious fairness," such as the troubled marble visions of Rodin, the misty rivers of Monet, the pagan paradises of Bocklin and the rounded harmonies of Renoir,-the sight of such things would call powerfully to the crea- tive ability hidden in this State to come forth and manifest itself. Creative ability may not be "ketching" like the measles, but the manifestation of it is. Walter Pater's legend is at least true to human nature. Leonardo and Michael Angelo were painting one day in competition for some prize, and Raphael, then a boy, coming to Florence for the first time, watched them as they worked. There was nothing for Raphael to do after that but to become an artist. If Raphael were born in North Carolina today, he would still be Raphael, but he would not paint pictures.

But how can these values be gotten out of art? How make the visible arts visible in North Carolina? How gain the as- cendency of a Prospero over this elusive Ariel and make him raise up for us his "cloud-capped towers and gorgeous palaces?"

It will be done, if it is done, not by babbling about beauty. It will be done only by putting before the eyes of all the people, and especially the children in the schools, "whatsoever things are lovely." There is no substitute for the visible ex- perience of beautiful things. Good taste is caught, not taught.

The problem is one in real life and calls for imagination, ingenuity, re- sourcefulness.

An approach is being made by way of exhibitions of paintings brought in from outside the State.

Much can be done through the schools.

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Page 5: Making the Visible Arts Visible in North Carolina

538 SOCIAL FORCES

Some of them already have good collec- tions of colored prints. Three schools in the State have original paintings by well known American artists. Mrs. Katherine P. Arrington is doing the State a real service in this respect.

Collections of works of art ought to be established in the larger and wealthier cit- ies of North Carolina, consisting of copies or reproductions of the best paintings and sculpture in the world, together with as many originals of modern art as practi- cable, which would doubtless be very few. But there is no reason to despise good copies. The best museums in this country are full of them. Their cost is within reach. A good collection could doubtless be established and maintained for a few thousand dollars.

Such collections would be a beginning. They would grow with the growing taste of the people, as the libraries all over the State are growing. Loans, legacies and endowments would gravitate to them. One of them might in time develop into that museum of the fine arts that all the South so badly needs. Meantime they would be doing their needed work.

Many people would pay no attention to them. On the other hand, many would see and enjoy them. And to a few they would be the very bread of life. To that few such a collection, though poor and small, would be like a light in darkness or a rainfall on a dusty field.

What this State might be, in not so long a time, developing as it is, if it were moulded by a people awakened by the sight of beautiful things to a desire for them in their daily lives, we can hardly imagine. A people with a taste for beautiful things will not build ugly or

commonplace houses. Perhaps even their politicians would not give orders for public buildings that are eyesores. Their manufactured products, such as furniture and textiles, would take on a new and valuable beauty. Streets, houses, roads, buildings, lawns, landscapes, the whole State, would be transformed.

Is it as impossible as it seems? The economic and social foundations of such a State have been laid in a sound prosperity and a widespread education. The super- structure that this generation is building now ought to be a beautiful one, if only to be worthy of the work of the foundation- builders. For they had great visions of what was to come. North Carolina has had her prophets no less than Israel. Governor Aycock saw this State in his mind's eye as a place "where every child might have the opportunity to burgeon out all that is there is within him." Walter Hines Page, that hard-headed idealist, audaciously predicted "a great outburst of art and of literature." Ed- ward Kidder Graham envisioned North Carolina as "the center of the next great forward movement in American progress. "

A State wearing beauty like a glowing garment is the only real fulfilment of these high hopes. This is the next logical step in the State's development.

But it is not automatic. It will come only by thought and work. It is the duty and the opportunity of the North Carolina State Art Society to make actual and concrete this ideal commonwealth which has been waiting for so long, just beyond the boundaries of the visible, in the minds and hearts of all those men and women who have truly loved this State.

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