Sanity & Mrs. Logan

Because elderly, unassuming Frank Granger Logan, 85, founder of the brokerage house of Logan & Bryan, has served 50 years on the board of the Chicago Art Institute, because he is now its honorary president, the Art Institute honored him last week with an exhibition of some 20 paintings which have won the Institute's famed Mr. & Mrs. Frank G. Logan medal and prize. Since 1917, 230 awards have been made, $75,949 distributed in prize money. At the same time last week, less retiring Mrs. Frank Granger Logan published at her own expense her long awaited blast against "modernistic" painting in an elaborately illustrated book entitled Sanity in Art.

Sanity in Art is more than the title of Mrs. Logan's book, it is an association and a movement of which she is the founder and mainspring. Born Josephine Hancock, daughter of Chicago's famed Col. John Lane Hancock, elderly Mrs. Logan is not only an active art patron, an avid clubwoman, but a poet. She has written two books of verse. Lights and Shadows and Heights and Depths, and many lyrics including a Negro monolog entitled Longing.

In 1935 a bitter complaint on the part of Mrs. Logan over the picture to which the Institute's committee had awarded the Logan prize (Doris Lee's Thanksgiving) won Mrs. Logan a surprising amount of space in the U. S. press (TIME, Nov. 18, 1935, et seq.). Since then she has appointed herself a champion of academic painting in the U. S., and the fullest explanation of her position to date is Sanity in Art.

The book begins with a preface by mountain-carving Sculptor Gutzon Borglum in which he writes: "Mrs. Logan has said: 'Art is colossal. . . .'" This is followed by a few brief chapters by the author herself extolling the Columbian World's Fair of 1893, objecting to French moderns, primitive art and such isms as cubism and surrealism. Says she: "Sanity in Art means soundness, rationalism, a correct integration of the art work itself in accordance with some internal logic. We know sanity is often difficult to define, and we also know insanity is often apparent at a glance. ... I have been called an iconoclast, and indeed I am one, in that

I am trying to destroy false gods that have been forced upon us in the museums." These sentiments are heartily seconded in Sanity in Art's ensuing pages by a number of press quotations from Music News, the Elkhart, Ind. Tribune, the Birming ham, N. Y. Press, followed by approving letters from Booth Tarkington, Baritone John Charles Thomas, Senator & Mrs. J. Hamilton Lewis, and Mrs. H. G. Wotherspoon, president of the Daytona Beach branch of the National League of American Penwomen. At the end of the book are appended, without any explanation, 98 pictures, starting with prehistoric rock carvings, showing 29 Logan prizewinners plus other canvases of mediocre representational cast, plus still more by Cezanne, Seurat, van Gogh, Gauguin, Salvador Dali.

The paintings are inextricably mixed, but Mrs. Logan says that the commonsensical U. S. public will have no trouble picking the sane art from the "faddist" art.

The book's most telling denunciation of modern painting comes not from Mrs. Logan but in a quotation from Critic Henry Rankin Poore, who to her great delight wrote : "At a recent exhibition of an interesting group of French 'Moderns' . . . was a small picture by Matisse of a sauce pan containing two broken eggs lying on a spotted cloth. . . . The eggs had dark brown shadows and even to the uncritical eye of man appeared doubtful. . . . On inquiring the price, it was found to be $5,000. . . . Let us appraise the components of the transaction: Canvas $1.00 Pigment .75 Frame 20.00 Signature 4,878.25"

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