The word "Modern Art" is a nasty word to some people and a new and beautiful word to others. It seems a little silly as the word, or its meaning, is not new, or nasty or a guarantee of quality.

Artists, authors, architects, musicians always used it and most people learned to like it and often the people were the ones that unconsciously demanded it.

The musicians used it in their compositions and called it fun with notes or off beat notes occasionally and made music interesting. In later years they went as far as writing whole compositions off beat and made immature kids and people act like off beat human beings.

Real artists, who portray nature and the includes human beings, just not as they appear to his eyes but after it hits his brain and his emotions go to work on what he sees in that particular scene. The outcome might be romantic, cruel, restful but always emotional and never just a series of facts. Just look at the well-known and well-liked picture, "Washington Crossing the Delaware". The artist did paint details but emotionally glorified the incident to satisfy his ego and yours. Take the painting, "The Death of Beethoven" with it's beautiful bedroom scene, a dignified and very effective picture, with its well dressed family, doctors and Holy atmosphere - and then take a cartoon by a German satirist who portrayed the scene as taking place in a small tavern with Beethoven rolling on the floor choking on a purple wienerwurst with the bartender and the patrons looking with awe stricken faces. These were both artists’ conceptions and could be classified as modern as they were purely works of imaginative minds.

A writer has that same sense and this is what makes history interesting and colorful - but they are fine jugglers of facts. Some modern writers go father and tell facts that really are distasteful and are classed as modern writers which makes a teller of dirty stories a modern individual.

All through time each civilization had its share of beautiful homes and buildings and they were all livable in their time, but people and architects had to have something that looked different and dreamed of different looks, different materials and different textures and people liked them, lived with them and learned to love them.

So Modern Art was always with us and we have to recognize the architects and artists right to use his visions, dreams and then only the things that are all right will live and make life a happier one.

An artist looks at a tree and his picture shows it as a snake, an angel or a scroll - we should look at it as his conception, and not as a poor conception, and either hate it or like it but don't let it affect your ulcers.

An artist, or a scientist, with his imagination has some and all elements of nature to work with - he really creates nothing he just reassembles these elements in different patterns, and colors, and hopes that something beautiful or of value to people are the result.

To prove the brain can not imagine anything really new - just asks an artist to paint a picture of the people who live on one of the other planets and you'll find that he used the things that he really knows and has seen. He just moves them around and maybe he will give a man two heads, one eye, and the legs of a spider, maybe he will walk on his hands but the elements he worked with are the same elements he has stored in his brain. The brain deals with facts, dreams are made of facts and artists, architects and musicians have the same brains that we have. Even a man who is insane might misuse them but he still can only have the things in his brains to scramble and distort. There's really nothing new in this world or in anybody's mind.

Why an artist can not use tinsel, dirt, sand, stones or metal in painting a picture is hard to understand (these are products of nature) and I don't think any art teacher should deny him that right. Michael Angelo could have made a great statue out of plastic or even in butter. I really only heard one judge, at an art exhibit, say that he believed a picture should not win a prize because the median would not last over ten years. He was overruled and I personally think it would be a good thing if works of are fell to dust in about twenty years - just look at most of the galleries, and some homes, and you just got to agree with me.

Some day go down to the Detroit Art Institute and look at Ravera's painting of Detroit as the home of the dynamic production line. It is modern in style, with presses and machinery mechanically imperfect, the working men also imperfect - but it portrays that period better than any artist I know could have done it. I have seen lots of photos, drawings and paintings of that period and none of them registers my feelings and lots of other people who went through it. Some people say the working men look dumb and look like part of the machinery - I'll tell you a man can't look different when he feeds a press - he just keeps on putting something in and taking it out and nothing happens, that's enough to make anybody look dumb. I have heard lots of criticism of this mural - but never an idea for those walls that rang a bell. The only one I would consider is to remodel the room, remove the fish and make it an art library or another picture gallery.

Even photographers try to be off beat today with soft focus, trick lens, tricky views and I think they are doing something worthwhile.

Advertising in the late years has used modern ideas in art in its ads and its given for greater variety emotionally and decoratively. Advertising needed it, as in the earlier years all the client thought about was bolts and nuts and detail - now they recognize that an automobile, furnace or a washing machine has a powerful emotional affect on the prospective buyer. When a man looks at an automobile he can get the same feeling as an artist looking at a piece of scenery - it takes some kind of a modern artist to get that feeling and it is worth trying.

As a board member of an art club, and a judge at many art shows, I have heard both praise and criticism of both modern and conventional art for years. I have found that the subject has divided artists and patrons into two distinct classes - both radical in their ideas. The juries became one sided also not really judging art, as an art piece, but whether it was modern or conventional which is just as silly as giving an award to a painter because he's a nice guy, needs the money, is a nephew of a high official or his wife is a good looker.

I have met men with lost of money who gave a prize to an art show with the condition it would go only to a conventional picture, or only to a modern painter, a distinction which painters themselves can't understand - as the conventional and modern ideas become hard to separate in most shows. Some modern paintings are excess on detail and some are painted with trowels, that goes for conventional as well, and the sooner the separation disappears and we judge them as a painter's expression the better for art and culture.

One artist claimed his work was modern because he painted the strata of a rock through a magnifying glass and as nobody knew what it was he felt he was doing something modern. He should have served a reducing glass with it and then it would have been academic.

I remember one lady who told of the great thrill she got when seeing, in an art exhibit, an eight by ten picture completely yellow in tone with one big black spot in a corner. She did not realize that the yellow color gave her a thrill just the same as a bull gets when he sees red. Colors affect people differently as a friend of mine get nauseated with the color green - where I receive quite a kick out of it and it calms my nerves but that don't make a green surface a piece of art by a long shot.

Every artist can use the modern slant, control it and he will be a better artist. That works both ways as a little academic angle won't hurt a man with modern ideas. One thing basically all should have is the art training that enables him to draw, know the facts of painting or in fact how to use the tools of the artist.

Until we get a larger view of these trends I think people should see all kinds of pictures in all shows without the misunderstood propaganda - if we need two distinct juries to do it let's do it and quit fighting our battles out loud, paint and try to sell our paintings for the art side. Pictures have lots of purposes, not only as decorations, color accents or conversations pieces, but some are used as propaganda to change peoples' minds, to make them hate people, make them open their pocketbooks and thousands of other reasons.

Religion has used them for instilling a feeling of responsibility to a higher authority and to make them realize that there is a future beyond this life - and they did a fairly good job.

Pictures like the Doctor holding the sick child's hand, with mother and father looking downcast and the medicine bottle on the table - you will find this in many doctors' offices today. This does a man no good when he is sitting in the doctor's office with a belly-ache and ought to be outlawed along with the colored prints of the Cavalier, in his red cloak, and sword - there are maybe 20,000 of them in Detroit homes.

An original picture is a must to me as reproductions get a little tiresome and make me think they were bought because somebody else had one and liked it - let's be an individual in everything. Pictures that tell a story, or picture an event belong as illustrations to books and not on our walls.

Pictures should be changed at least once a year, put away and brought out again later - it will help make your home alive and interesting.

Kid’s paintings and drawings are fascinating to me as they are the original modern artists. I like to see one on everybody's wall and do a good framing job, they deserve it. Don't tell them they are modern painters as they wouldn't understand any more than most of the judges that judge our shows.