NEW CRITERIA

The survival and growth of the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art is an indication that such an organization has a real function in the University. In an atmosphere of pedantry, which consists of the picking over of long dead ideas and events, it is revivifying to have an active interest shown in such creative movements which look toward the future.

To the uninitiated much of modern painting and sculpture is grotesque and meaningless, but its significance cannot be lightly explained away as the effusions of a decadent and mildly insane school of Bohemians. The growth of all living art is caused by that outer fringe of radicals, who are trying to break away from the established order and create new and more expressive modes peculiar to themselves. It is true that a great many artists who belong to this borderland quest for the new and the strange are wild eyed romantics disregarding all discipline and moderation. There are also extremists in the other direction, who impose a rigider and more inapplicable set of rules on themselves than those conventions from which they are revolting. However the future trends of art lie in the hands of this so called modernistic group and this fact alone makes them worth watching. It should not be forgotten that the established order of today sprang from, the misunderstood radicals of yesterday.