A WORD FROM THE DIRECTOR OF THE DENVER ART ASSOCIATION

The Art of the Moving Picture, as it appeared six years ago, possessed among many elements of beauty at least one peculiarity.  It viewed art as a reality, and one of our most familiar and popular realities as an art.  This should have made the book either a revelation or utter Greek to most of us, and those who read it probably dropped it easily into one or the other of the two categories.

For myself, long a propagandist for its doctrines in another but related field, the book came as a great solace.  In it I found, not an appeal to have the art museum used—­which would have been an old though welcome story—­not this, but much to my surprise, the art museum actually at work, one of the very wheels on which our culture rolled forward upon its hopeful way.  I saw among other museums the one whose destinies I was tenderly guiding, playing in Lindsay’s book the part that is played by the classic myths in Milton, or by the dictionary in the writings of the rest of us.  For once the museum and its contents appeared, not as a lovely curiosity, but as one of the basic, and in a sense humble necessities of life.  To paraphrase the author’s own text, the art museum, like the furniture in a good movie, was actually “in motion”—­a character in the play.  On this point of view as on a pivot turns the whole book.

In The Art of the Moving Picture the nature and domain of a new Muse is defined.  She is the first legitimate addition to the family since classic times.  And as it required trained painters of pictures like Fulton and Morse to visualize the possibility of the steamboat and the telegraph, so the bold seer who perceived the true nature of this new star in our nightly heavens, it should here be recorded, acquired much of the vision of his seeing eye through an early training in art.  Vachel Lindsay (as he himself proudly asserts) was a student at the Institute in Chicago for four years, spent one more at the League and at Chase’s in New York, and for four more haunted the Metropolitan Museum, lecturing to his fellows on every art there shown from the Egyptian to that of Arthur B. Davies.

Only such a background as this could have evolved the conception of “Architecture, sculpture, and painting in motion” and given authenticity to its presentation.  The validity of Lindsay’s analysis is attested by Freeburg’s helpful characterization, “Composition in fluid forms,” which it seems to have suggested.  To Lindsay’s category one would be tempted to add, “pattern in motion,” applying it to such a film as the “Caligari” which he and I have seen together and discussed during these past few days.  Pattern in this connection would imply an emphasis on the intrinsic suggestion of the spot and shape apart from their immediate relation to the appearance of natural objects.  But this is a digression.  It simply serves to show the breadth and adaptability of Lindsay’s method.