Fine Arts Frailties

The Fine Arts Department offers a wide choice of survey and period courses in the history of art. Aided by slides and the Fogg Museum collection, undergraduates can study stone age frescoes or surrealist paintings, can peer into pyramids or glass houses. But in creative painting, the Department offers no adequate instruction.

Annually would-be artists turn to Fine Arts 12, "The Theory of Drawing and Painting and the Principles of Design." For eight months they construct color wheels and analyze colors, long and tedious exercises which limited creative work to three still lives during the whole year.

Before Fine Arts 12 is again given next year, the Department must find a replacement for the present instructor who leaves in June. While looking for a new man, the Department ought to renovate this theory-ridden course.

Department officials admit that theory could be compacted into a term or less, and that in the remainder of the courses undergraduates could draw and paint. Only a stubborn pursuit of tradition keeps Fine Arts 12 an abstract color wheel: a creative course smacks of "vocational training" against which President Lowell set University policy twenty-six years ago. But an elementary course in painting would not possibly be vocational because it would not produce any professional artists.

Fine Arts 12, emphasizing practice rather than theory, can add to Harvard education a type of course now given in most other colleges. Yale, for instance, has a class for "Sunday painters," and Princeton an atelier where students paint for credit. At Harvard, undergraduates with an urge to paint rate one course to test and develop their talents.