The Galleries of the Exposition | Page 2

considerable reluctance. The visitor, however, finds himself cleverly
tempted by numerous stray bits of detached sculpture, effectively
placed amidst shrubbery near the Laguna, and almost without knowing
he is drawn into that enchanting colonnade which leads one to the
spacious portals of the Palace of Fine Arts.
It was a vast undertaking to gather such numbers of pictures together,
but the reward was great - not only to have gratified one's sense of
beauty, but to have contributed toward a broader civilization, on the
Pacific Coast specifically, and for the world in general besides. It must
be admitted that it was no small task, in the face of many very unusual
adverse circumstances, to bring together here the art of the world. Mr.
John E. D. Trask deserves unstinted praise for the perseverance with
which, under most trying circumstances, unusual enough to defeat
almost any collective undertaking, he brought together this highly
creditable collection of art. Wartime conditions abroad and the great
distance to the Pacific Coast, not to speak of difficulties of physical
transportation, called for a singularly capable executive, such as John E.
D. Trask has proved himself to be, and the world should gratefully
acknowledge a big piece of work well done. I do not believe the art
exhibition needs any apologies. Its general character is such as fully to
satisfy the standards of former international expositions.
It seems only rational that, with the notorious absence of any important
permanent exhibition of works of art on the Pacific Coast, an effort
should have been made to present within the exhibit the development
of the art of easel painting since its inception, because it seems
impossible to do justice to any phase of art without an opportunity of
comparison, such as the exposition affords. The retrospective aspects of
the exhibition are absorbingly interesting, not so much for the

presentation of any eminently great works of art as for the splendid
chance for first-hand comparison of different periods. Painting is
relatively so new an art that the earliest paintings we know of do not
differ materially in a technical sense from our present-day work.
Archaeology has disinterred various badly preserved and unpresentable
relics of old arts such as sculpture and architecture. It is little so with
pictures. Painting is really the most recent of all the fine arts. It must
seem almost unbelievable that the greatest periods of architecture and
sculpture had become classic when painting made its début as an
independent art. It is true enough that the Assyrians and Egyptians used
colour, but not in the sense of the modern easel painter. We are also
informed, rather less than more reliably, that a gentleman by the name
of Apelles, in the days of Phidias, painted still-lifes so naturally that
birds were tempted to peck at them, and we know much more
accurately of the many delightful bits of wall-painting the rich man of
Pompeii and Herculaneum used to have put on his walls, but the easel
painting is a creation of modern times.
The sole reason for this can hardly be explained better than by pointing
out the long-standing lack of a suitable medium which would permit
the making of finer paintings, other than wall and decorative paintings.
The old tempera medium was hardly suited to finer work, since it was a
makeshift of very inadequate working qualities. Briefly, the method
consisted of mixing any pigment or paint in powder form with any
suitable sticky substance which would make it adhere to a surface.
Sticky substances frequently used were the tree gums collected from
certain fruit-trees, including the fig and the cherry. This crude method
is known by the word "tempera," which comes from the Latin
"temperare," to modify or mix, and denotes merely any alteration of the
original pigment. Tempera painting, as the only technique known, was
really a great blessing to the world, since it prevented the wholesale
production in a short time of such vast quantities of pictures as the
world nowadays is asked to enjoy. I am not so sure that the two
brothers, the Flemish painters Hubert and Jan van Eyck, who are said to
have given us the modern oil method, are really so much deserving of
praise, since their improved method of painting with oils caused a
production of paintings half of which might much better have remained
unpainted. The one thing that can be said of all paintings made before

their day is that they were painted for a practical purpose. They had to
fit into certain physical conditions, architectural or other. Most modern
paintings are simply painted on a gambler's chance of finding suitable
surroundings afterwards. Nowadays a picture is produced with the one
idea of separating it from the rest of the world by a more or less
hideous