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University Daily Kansan Friday, April 17, 1959
Challenge Faces Victors
The contest of elections is over. Campaign posters are finding their way into wastebaskets. The ballots are counted, winners named and the newly elected representatives and officers are preparing to assume their duties.
The true test of their ability lies ahead. It can only be measured by the way in which they fulfill their responsibilities of the position to which they have been elected.
Vox Populi evidently received a vote of confidence from the student body by winning 20 of the 26 seats on the All Student Council plus the president and vice president of the student body. This responsibility thus entrusted to them puts these representatives and officers in even greater
debt to the student body. They cannot afford to rest upon their promises.
With the glory and excitement of campaigning over, only work remains, not only the obligation to attend meetings, but the conscious effort to contribute useful and thoughtful ideas, not to do the usual, but to do the extra work which an effective student government requires.
Whenever these representatives meet with a committee, vote or speak for or against a proposal this next year in the ASC, their electorate will be watching them.
The victory has been won. The greatest challenge still must be met. How it is met will determine the caliber of student government at the University next year. —Pat Swanson
Youth's Mass March for Justice
Tomorrow will probably be a rather noisy day in Washington, D.C. Thousands of American young people are marching on the nation's capital that day to present a petition to the President and Congress.
This petition is simple and direct. It states:
"We, the undersigned, petition the President and Congress of the United States to put into effect an executive and legislative program which will insure the orderly and speedy integration of schools throughout the United States."
I wish them luck.
It has been almost five years since the Supreme Court made its decision calling for integration of the schools. Since that time, we have made progress. However, to this day, complete and unobstructed integration is no more a reality than it was in 1954.
Schools remain closed to Negroes while state and local governments employ diversionary methods which permit segregation to continue under the guise of private schools. Men like Orval Faubus keep one step ahead of our slow federal court decrees, while our leaders in Washington wait for the miracle of understanding to solve the problem.
These people who will march down Constitution Avenue tomorrow will only ask that which is law be made effective without further
delay. With the law of the land and right on their side, it is my hope that they will be heard.
Conservatives may cringe at this method of promoting legislation. They might rightly say that it represents emotionalism and mass strength, and is contrary to individual expression. A few radicals may go so far as to say it is un-American.
There is one thing a mass demonstration is not, and that is un-American. The one theme in this nation today that is un-American is our continual state of apathy concerning the problems of our times.
This apathy extends to the very heart of government; and if this mass march by young Americans can jolt our lawmakers into enforcing laws that have been passed and disregarded, then the tramping feet will benefit us all.
I condone the petition because it only asks for what is right. I approve of the petitioners' method of presentation because it is no more than the people going to their own government to ask that the will of the people be effected.
I do not ask that anyone sign the petition, for this is a matter of personal choice. I do not say that we should join the march.
I only say that we should not condemn them, fear them or laugh at them. Indeed, we should watch them with interest, and thank them for what they do: They challenge our complacency and ask for justice. —George DeBord
Regionalist's Show Diverse
Bv Jack Schrader
Thirty years ago the movement called "Regionalism" meant a good deal on the American artistic scene. The mere mention of the term was a good starting point for an argument about contemporary American art.
But today the word itself has lost much of its earlier significance. What seems important to us now are the individual talents of the three artists who led the movement of Regionalism—John Steuart Curry of Kansas, Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri, and Grant Wood of Iowa.
The Museum of Art has helped us make up our own minds about the significance of the Regionalists by showing retrospective exhibitions on Curry, 1957, Benton, 1958, and Wood, currently showing.
The Wood exhibition shows the greatest diversity in style one could imagine. This is due largely to a showing of much of Wood's
early work, which consists of a variety of early 20th Century styles. His Regionalist work during the thirties also shows a fairly wide range of interpretation, although it is always bound together by his loyalty to truly American subject matter.
Perhaps the biggest shock to one's predetermined ideas about Grant Wood is "The Spotted Man," which bears a likeness to the Pointillism of Seurat. Wood's "Corner in Montmartre" is stylistically close to a Utrillo Montmartre scene, and "Old Shoes" is strikingly Post-Impressionistic.
However, the Regionalist works in the Grant Wood exhibition are certainly the most important in the evolution of the artist's style. It is in works like the rather humorous "Parson Weem's Fable," the landscape "Stone City," and Wood's 1932 "Self-Portrait" that one sees the artist's meticulous execution, his distinctive technique of building up a surface in many paint layers, his natural colors, and his emphasis on space and design.
Dailu Hansan
University of Kansas student newspaper
Extension 376, business office
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Prizely Freedom
The Grant Wood retrospective exhibition is an extremely successful attempt to bring to the campus a representative cross-section of the work of a farm boy of Iowa who holds a high rank among American painters. The only thing lacking is "American Gothic" itself, which like several other famous Wood paintings could not be lent but fortunately is represented by the original sketch.
Poetry Corner
By Augustine G. Kyei
I envy the freedom of the tree
That reaches out in freedom spree.
I envy the freedom of the grass
That grows wild and unseen
In the forest glade,
In the mountain range;
And the freedom of the air
Whose passage nature's green stirs
In sprightly dance;
And the freedom of humans;
Bestowed at birth,
Forsaken at death.
Such freedom,
Priceless and yet prizely
Passes muster where freedom rules.
Hanker'd after where tyranny
Papers report that 56 Hawaiians packed themselves into one canoe on Waikiki Beach. The canoe sank in shallow water. Let's hope that this craze doesn't hit Potter Lake. The results could be disastrous.
Wood Gains Fame With 'American Gothic'
By Calder M. Pickett
Assistant Professor of Journalism
Grant Wood, the Regionalist painter whose work will be on exhibit at the Museum of Art through May 30, swept to fame in 1930 with the appearance of "American Gothic."
His emergence as the chief apostle of Regionalism was not unrelated to other currents of the early 1930s. Regionalism was a form of cultural isolationism that characterized the period. Nationalism was a dominant world force. Mussolini was in power in Italy. The Japanese soon would invade Manchuria. Hitler was on the rise. The London Naval Conference was limiting capital ships.
Writers were turning to regional themes. The Southern Agrarians were voicing their creed in "I'll Take My Stand."
Wood, the Iowa painter who had been unable to make a splash in Paris, would soon set down himself, in "Revolt Against the City," the creed of Regionalism: When regions develop characteristics of their own, and throw off the influence of Europe, they will be able to develop an American culture of their own.
In a book called "Modern Art," Thomas Craven was beating the tom-toms for the Regional painters, and flaying the French. C. J. Bulliet, later the art critic of the Chicago Daily News, was giving wide recognition to "American Gothic" in the old Chicago Evening Post. Peyton Boswell of the Art Digest was calling for recognition of the Regional painters.
Wood, like John Steuart Curry and Thomas Hart Benton, was a Midwesterner. He was graduated from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, High School, attended the Minneapolis School of Design and Handicraft and Normal Art, taught for a time in a one-room country school.
He did not go to Paris until the early 1920s, and there he experimented with surrealism and attained notoriety among his friends with the painting of a male nude that came to be known as "Spotted Man." He soon found himself back in America, at work in Cedar Rapids.
In 1927 Wood received a commission to make a stained-glass window in Cedar Rapids. He had it made in Europe, and he encountered the wrath of the Daughters of the American Revolution. Their attack upon him bore fruit: Many years later he painted a savage caricature, "Daughters of Revolution."
savage caricature. Daughters in Wood's early Regional painting came in the late 1920s: "John B. Turner, Pioneer," and "Woman with Plants," a portrait of his mother. In 1930, along with "Gothic," for which Wood's dentist and his sister posed, he painted "Stone City." which contained his landscape trademark—bulbous trees, inspired by those on his mother's Haviland china.
Fame came with "American Gothic," perhaps his best-known work (which Meredith Willson has utilized in "The Music Man," a play about Iowa that Grant Wood surely would have appreciated). Other paintings soon appeared: "Midnight Ride of Paul Revere," which looks like a tabletop landscape; "Birth-Place of Herbert Hoover," which was as popular for a time as Hoover himself. His "Daughters of Revolution" came in 1932, three tea-sipping ladies posed in front of Leutze's "Washington Crossing the Delaware."
The late 1930s and early 1940s brought fame to Wood that was comparable to that of a film star. He developed mannerisms, became somewhat of a character, helped to establish the cult of Regionalism (which probably was more of an afterthought than a conscious school of painting). He did the mural, "Dinner for Threshers," once again painting the rough farm people he knew so well in Iowa.
Wood died in 1942. He and Regionalism remain famous, though neither now receives serious recognition from art critics. The artistic retreat that came to be known as Regionalism likely will be regarded by history as one more movement that characterized the worried and alarmed United States of the terrible thirties.
SPRING IN TOWN—Carol Abernathy, Kansas City, Kan., junior, examines one of the paintings in the Grant Wood exhibition on display in the Museum of Art through May 30.