Taylor Declares Art Can Arouse Balanced Opinion

The Fogg Art Museum is the most suitable means in the entire University for restoring the equilibrium to general education which modern science has upset during the past two generations, Francis H. Taylor, Director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, stated yesterday.

"The best weapon which we have at our command in the battle for preserving the intellectual freedom of this country is the strength of the humanistic tradition in our liberal arts colleges," Taylor told applauding members of the Harvard Foundation for Advanced Study and the Law School Alumni Association.

Speaking at the two groups' annual joint luncheon in the Harkness Quadrangle, Taylor said that "somewhere on every campus half way between the chapel and cyclotron there must be a laboratory of the humanities in which, as in the college library, are preserved the immutable judgments of the past and of the present."

"This must be a place for self-communion, a place where, without any predetermined theological allegiance or the aid of any high priest, the student can profitably waste his time pulling together the unravelled threads of the curriculum and reaching the tastes and judgments which will inevitably guide his after life," be continued.

The history of art is not a dead-end street of higher criticism, but rather the mirror to history in its broadest aspects. It has by virtue of necessity, and particularly at the undergraduate level, come to symbolize that universal synthesis for our modern world which the medieval schoolmen hoped to find in the theological universality of St. Thomas Aquinas, Taylor said.

"Fogg Museum," Taylor said, "serves an even wider purpose than appears on the surface. It is the principal training ground for the museum personnel of this country."