Democratic Sentinel, Volume 13, Number 31, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 23 August 1889 — Artistic Indifference. [ARTICLE]

Artistic Indifference.

I must mention a melancholy fact which shows how factitious is the" taste of the public for art, says a Paris correspondent. People go in shoals to an art exhibition when it is a “fashionable” one; it is the proper thing then. It seems that the exhibition of Barye’s works is not fashionable, for no one goes to it; the entrance fees scarcely amount to more than a guinea a day. Although the hall has been lent by the Beaux Arts school, the expenses will not be covered; and yet some of the bronzes exposed are perfect masterpieces, worthy of Grecian art. Barye is the first sculptor who ever modeled animals as they really are. Before his time people were satisfied with the wigged lions, such as those that decorate Trafalgar square; triumphs of conventionality, negations of truth. He took the trouble to go to Jardin des Plantes and study the living model; and although the king of the desert does not come out to his full advantage in a ca§e, still Barye modeled marvelous things. He loved all wild animals—even elephants, buffaloes, and rhinoceroses, dogs, stags, roes, goats, or even rabbits, serpents, lizards—in fact, all animals. But it is the custom to consider as secondary the art of an animal painter or animal sculptor, and poor Barye died in distress beside his masterpieces. It is, however, some consolation for his ghost to know that Americans are covering his bronzes with gold; although it is shameful that in his own land such indifference is shown to his memory. It is said that America w ill erect the statue of which France does not deem him worthy.