A WORD FROM THE DIRECTOR OF THE DENVER ART ASSOCIATION

The Art of the Moving Picture, as it appeared six years ago, possessed
among many elements of beauty at least one peculiarity. It viewed art as
a reality, and one of our most familiar and popular realities as an art.
This should have made the book either a revelation or utter Greek to most
of us, and those who read it probably dropped it easily into one or the
other of the two categories.

For myself, long a propagandist for its doctrines in another but related
field, the book came as a great solace. In it I found, not an appeal to
have the art museum used--which would have been an old though welcome
story--not this, but much to my surprise, the art museum actually at
work, one of the very wheels on which our culture rolled forward upon its
hopeful way. I saw among other museums the one whose destinies I was
tenderly guiding, playing in Lindsay's book the part that is played by
the classic myths in Milton, or by the dictionary in the writings of the
rest of us. For once the museum and its contents appeared, not as a
lovely curiosity, but as one of the basic, and in a sense humble
necessities of life. To paraphrase the author's own text, the art museum,
like the furniture in a good movie, was actually "in motion"--a character
in the play. On this point of view as on a pivot turns the whole book.

In The Art of the Moving Picture the nature and domain of a new Muse is
defined. She is the first legitimate addition to the family since classic
times. And as it required trained painters of pictures like Fulton and
Morse to visualize the possibility of the steamboat and the telegraph, so
the bold seer who perceived the true nature of this new star in our
nightly heavens, it should here be recorded, acquired much of the vision
of his seeing eye through an early training in art. Vachel Lindsay (as he