flected in its exhibitions, for, with the exception of a loan collection of art, nothing will be shown which has not been produced since the St. Louis Exposition of 1904. Also, I am informed, it is the first American exposition to have an appropriation for mural paintings. True, there were mural paintings at the Chicago World's Fair, but they were not provided for by appropriation, having been paid for by the late Frank Millet, with money saved from other things. Of the painters who will have mural decorations at the Exposition, but one, Frank Brangwyn, is not an American. Also, but one is a Californian, that one be- ing Arthur F. Mathews. The only mural decorations in the Fine Arts Building will be eight enormous panels by Robert Reid, in the in- terior of the dome, eighty feet above the floor. Four of the panels symbolize Art; the others the "four golds of California": poppies, citrus fruits, metallic gold and golden wheat. Among the various excursions to the Exposition, I hope there will be one for old-school mural decorators--men who paint stiff central figures in brick- red robes, enthroned, and surrounded by cog-wheels, pro- pellers, and bales of cotton, with the invariable male fig- ures petrified at a forge upon one side, and the invariable inert mothers and children upon the other--I hope there will be an excursion to take such painters out and show them the brave swirl and sweep of line, the light, and the nacreous color which this artist has thrown into his decorations at the Fair. -499- |