We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
^jm^m^^AWM^MAWAw
<
V^A^KA^AAAAAAM^AA^^MKSk
THE WORLD'S LEADING MOVING PICTURE MAGAZINE
PHOTOPLAY
VOL. XIII
APRIL, 1918
NO. 5
oArt and democracy
7J\[ the olden days, painters, musicians, poets and sculptors lived on the bounty of monarchs and princes. If they pleased their royal patrons, they were per'
mitted to go on wor\ing until some other artists, by intrigue or influence, supplanted them.
Then a wealthy merchant class sprang up, and, imitating the aristocrats, sought reflected glory by patronizing the arts.
This condition continued until the close of the nineteenth century. Art scorned democracy. For people of moderate wealth and for the poor there were only museums where they were permitted to see pictures and statues that they could not hope to own. In the very magnificence of the displays they were made to feel the more \eenly the fact that this was not THEIR art, that it was not made for THEM, that it was being doled out to them as a splendid philanthropy.
Moreover, the artists, understanding that their revenue must come from the class which could afford to pay big prices for it, did not try to ma\e their art in' terpret the lives and the souls of the less fortunate. They sought to ma\e their wor\ more and more remote, so that it could be understood only by those who had leisure and means for study.
Democracy was crying in the wilderness for an art of its own, and the artists turned a deaf ear.
Then came the moving picture, and democracy clasped it to its heart. This was something for the people themselves. 7\(ot that they were blind to its defects, not that they believed it perfect from its beginning — but it was their own. It was the first arPchild of democracy.
And as it developed, while the aristocrats of art sneered and scoffed, there were not lackyng those who saw the moving picture as worthy of a place with its older brothers and sisters. Many a pictured landscape would have inspired Inness or Corot. John Bunny would have been a joy to Franz Hals. Renoir would have gone into ecstacies over Pauline Frederick^. Meissonier would have thrilled at such spectacles as "The Birth of a J^ation" and "Joan the Woman."
The moving picture art is not the art of the cubist, the futurist, the syn' chromist, the vorticist or any other what'd'ye'call'it'ist. It does not base its repw tation upon obscurity of meaning. It is an art which uses simple language and direct statement, li\e the old masters of painting, li\e Mozart and Haydn, li\e Michael Angelo. It is an art of the people, for the people.
Thus it transpires that today the humble patron of the movie show is a patron of art as truly as Lorenzo the Magnificent. For li\e Lorenzo, he is supporting what, to him, is art. And since to him it is art — it IS art.
TiWMYMYYYYMYyy^VVVY^Wl
V)