PICTURA POESIS

Occasionally it seems as though the art of exposing the truth is the only thing that modern scholarship can do with its time. This is deplorable enough. But when matters progress so far that a good, honest hoax is cut off in the very blossoms of popularity. It is allowable that conscientious Americans should object. The baring of the art hoax in Boston yesterday, a mere three years after Upton Sinclair had told his small world of readers about it, is clearly a case that cannot be handled in town meeting. Progressive action is demanded.

The situation has reached an alarming stage in this country, what with the slandering of the nation's forefathers, and the spreading of communistic propaganda. It is but a step from shocking patriotic citizens with the outrageous statement that George Washington liked a strong glass of whiskey, to the utter destruction of ideals.

In all this mania of debunking, things which everyone knows are true, little thought has been given to the children. They have been robbed of fairies and Santa Claus and everything which makes life worth living. Now this thoughtless devastation of beliefs must stop. It has come to the point of destroying the very basis of art. What will Bohemia do, if obscurity is removed as a foundation of artistic achievement? Suppose art juries discover that dynamic symmetry may be dispensed with by a truly "original" artist?

To destroy patriotism and reverence for our heroes is bad, to blast the happy counterfeits that throng the precious memory of childhood is still worse, but to remove the stock and stay of the Latin Quarter is unutterable. Art galleries, painters, dowager dilettantes, lily fingered aesthetes, all down in one cataclysmic head. It must not be.