Art for Exhibition's Sake

Several years after the Second World War the Harvard Art Club, faced with a temporary decline of student interest, had to put away its easels and palettes. One of the principal events in the club's calendar had been an annual art exhibition staged with the motherly help of the Fogg Museum. When the group came to an end, so did the student exhibits. The Museum was not responsible for discontinuing the displays, nor did it lose interest, but it did not feel able or willing to sponsor them without organized student support.

Since then University artists have occasionally given visible signs of their activity. A few have been fortunate enough to arrange displays in local galleries. But most are not sufficiently advanced to command one-man showing. Last year, however, an exhibit of paintings by several graduate students was held in Lamont Library. Welcome as this exhibition was, it had the major shortcomings of not including undergraduate works and of excluding women visitors, because of a Lamont regulation.

This winter another student exhibition is being planned of paintings produced in fine arts classes. An ideal location has been found in the large show room in Robinson Hall, the scene of displays last year by Stein and Calder. The reappearance of student exhibits is gratifying. This year's course display, however, should be expanded to include selected works from all student painters at the University. In such an enlarged exhibit the works from fine arts classes could and most probably ought to be shown separately from other paintings. But a University-wide showing would help to reorganize the activity of student artists. It would also provide an opportunity to view paintings created outside of courses.