Indian Art and Letters

Author(s): India Society
Publisher: India Society

Page 22

MODERN ART IN WESTERN INDIA By W. E. GLADSTONE SOLOMON, K.-i-H., R.B.C., I.E.S.
(Director Government School of Art, Bombay; Curator, Art Section, Prince of Wales Museum
OW of Western India)
CHAIRMAN (MR. JOHN DE LA VALETTE) : LADIES AND GENTLEMEN,
To those who are present to-day as members of the India Society Captain W. E. Gladstone Solomon will need no introduction, but for any of you who are here as guests to-night I ought, perhaps, to say that Captain Gladstone Solomon is the Principal of the School of Art in Bombay, and that we in this Society owe him a special debt of gratitude for the work he has been doing recently in organizing a Regional Committee in Bombay to help us in getting together a good selection of modern Western Indian pictures for the Exhibition which we shall be seeing next month at the New Burlington Galleries.
I believe I am right in saying that Captain Gladstone Solomon had his first training in art at the Royal Academy School, and that his first contact with the East came not through the arts of peace, but through those of war. It was during his five years of service that he first got in touch with the Near East, starting at Gallipoli, eventually proceeding to India, where after the war he became Principal of the School of Art in Bombay.
In that capacity he did a great deal of work about which he will be too modest to tell you much himself, but I hope that in what he is going to tell us to-night he will show us the justification of his work by its results.
There is one thing I ought to tell you about him before I sit down, and that is that in my opinion he has done the most astounding thing any Englishman has ever done. He has persuaded a British Government that Art is a respectable thing in its own right. (Applause.) I do not want you to think lightly of that, because it is a remarkable achievement. As a rule, in this country we look upon beauty and art as dangerous things with which people should be allowed to play only under proper guidance. We therefore invariably put the management of our artistic affairs in the hands of the Educational Authorities.
I wonder whether that is quite right, because education, as I see it, attempts to make as large a number of people as possible superficially competent enough to pass certain standardized examinations, whereas the mastering
• Lecture delivered before the India Society in the Lecture Hall of the Royal Society, Burlington House, on November 21, 1934; Mr. John de La Valette presided. 100