Los Angeles thinks of itself as an art-loving town. Its city council annually puts up the money for a show of works by local painters and sculptors. But last week a councilman named Harold Harby took a look at what he was paying for, and turned into a frothing critic.
Harby dragged some specimens from the current municipal art show to a city council meeting. One of them, the second-prizewinner, was a marine painting called The First Surge of the Sea. Demanded Harby: Wasn't that a Communist hammer & sickle brazenly displayed on the sails of the nearest boat? He pointed to a modernistic wood carving of a mother & child. "I've seen potatoes freshly dug from a field look better than this," he said. And what about the red hue in the canvas of the first-prizewinner-was that a forest fire, or what?
Officials of the show &and some of the contributing artists &-in sharp rebuttal. The hammer & sickle on the sails, it turned out, was really just a large C (for clipper) with an I (for island) drawn through i &the symbol for the Island Clipper class. The red hue was not a forest fire, said Artist Gerald Campbell, but a symbol of birth. When Critic Harby muttered something under his breath at that, Artist Campbell rapped back: "I won't stand for this ... I spent two years in the Army fighting for freedom of expression."
Harby was still hot. "Who," he demanded, "would pay $250 for it?"
"I will," said a voice from the gallery. It was an art dealer, and he did.
This week the fight still raged. Promised Harby: "I'm going to vote no more funds to the city art department as long as they put out this kind of stinkweed stuff." Through it all, only one councilman declined the critic's chair. Said Ed Roybal: "I don't think we should sit as art critics. Deciding what is good art should be left to men who know what they're doing."