Art: Copyists

Surrounded by pupils, folding camp stools, easels, paint boxes and little bottles of water, a lady instructor of the New York School of Design invaded Brooklyn last week with the intention of setting her brood to copying the water colors of the late great John Singer Sargent and the late great Winslow Homer in the Brooklyn Institute of Arts & Sciences.

A stern museum guard barred the way. They appealed to Curator Herbert B. Tschudy. He was polite but firm: they could copy almost anything else in the Museum, provided the copies were only of parts of pictures—but not the Sargents and Homers. When the Museum bought its Sargents from the bearded Bostonian, it promised that his water colors should never be copied.

The argument waxed hotter. Curator Tschudy is reported to have said: "I cannot believe that students learn anything from copying." The lady instructor and the pupils packed up their folding camp stools, easels, paint boxes and little bottles of water, went back to Manhattan and told the whole story to their director, Miss Kay Hardy. Said she: "Museums with interesting and educational exhibitions should not be permitted to have curators who are so out of sympathy with the progress of educational art. . . ."

"Unfair!" cried Curator Tschudy. ". . Should general permission be given for making complete copies of Sargent and Homer paintings, some of the better reproductions would find their way into the market and be passed off as originals. The Museum's restrictions tend to act as a protection to art dealers."

The question of copying masterpieces gave the U. S. art world a week's conversation. Besides the obvious question of whether slavish copying of another man's work gives a student technical training as much as it deadens his individuality and imagination, was the larger problem of whether great paintings should be copied at all. Familiarity does breed contempt. Mona Lisa is undoubtedly a great painting, but two generations of post cards, meat calendars, candy boxes and gift shoppes have spoiled it for the youth of this century.