Contemporary Art Society

(Ed. Note--The Crimson does not necessarily endorse opinions expressed in printed communications. No attention will be paid to anonymous letters and only under special conditions, at the request of the writer, will names be withheld.)

To the Editor of the CRIMSON:

In yesterday's CRIMSON appeared an editorial on the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art, entitled "Ordeal of Battle." The misunderstandings and inaccuracies in the editorial are too many to be allowed to pass uncorrected.

In the first place, the editorial mentions "a reorganization of last Spring." The Society has never been reorganized. At a regular meeting of the trustees last year, three undergraduates were appointed to take the place of the three who had graduated. This was in no sense of the word a reorganization, but merely a succession.

The editorial intimates that the original purpose of the Society has been abandoned "to conform to popular taste or in a search for novelty for its own sake." From the first it has been the policy of the Society to present new trends in contemporary art, not for their freakishness but as a means of informing Cambridge and Boston of modern movements. The Society does in no way depart from this policy in presenting the forthcoming show of the work of Ben Shahn.

Mr. Shahn believes strongly in the importance of subject matter in painting and the universality of appeal, only made possible by an easy understanding of the subject. This idea is a new departure from the increasingly common abstraction of modern art. Mr. Shahn takes the reportorial rather than the editorial point of view in his painting.

If by chance it has been construed that the show is being given because of the recent reawakening of the Sacco-Vanzetti controversy, the Society wishes to recall that the show was planned and announced last spring in its catalogue, and that the artist's eighty different treatment of the Dreyfus Case is equally stressed.

Finally, the editorial states that the Society was formerly conducted by a "professional administrator," and that undergraduates served in an advisory capacity. The Society was organized by three Harvard undergraduates in 1929 with the stipulation that if he conducted solely by an undergraduate executive board. It has at no time been in the hands of "a professional administrator." This would have violated the Society's "original purpose."

The Excentives of the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art.