The book was written for a visual-minded public and for those who would be its leaders.  A long, long line of picture-readers trailing from the dawn of history, stimulated all the masterpieces of pictorial art from Altamira to Michelangelo.  For less than five centuries now Gutenberg has had them scurrying to learn their A, B, C’s, but they are drifting back to their old ways again, and nightly are forming themselves in cues at the doorways of the “Isis,” the “Tivoli,” and the “Riviera,” the while it is sadly noted that “‘the pictures’ are driving literature off the parlor table.”

With the creative implications of this new pictorial art, with the whole visual-minded race clamoring for more, what may we not dream in the way of a new renaissance?  How are we to step in to the possession of such a destiny?  Are the institutions with a purely literary theory of life going to meet the need?  Are the art schools and the art museums making themselves ready to assimilate a new art form?  Or what is the type of institution that will ultimately take the position of leadership in culture through this new universal instrument?

What possibilities lie in this art, once it is understood and developed, to plant new conceptions of civic and national idealism?  How far may it go in cultivating concerted emotion in the now ungoverned crowd?  Such questions as these can be answered only by minds with the imagination to see art as a reality; with faith to visualize for the little mid-western “home town” a new and living Pallas Athena; with courage to raze the very houses of the city to make new and greater forums and “civic centres.”

For ourselves in Denver, we shall try to do justice to the new Muse.  In the museum which we build we shall provide a shrine for her.  We shall first endeavor by those simple means which lie to our hands, to know the areas of charm and imagination which remain as yet an untilled field of her domain.  Plowing is a simple art, but it requires much sweat.  This at least we know—­to the expenditure we cheerfully consent.  So much for the beginning.  It would be boastful to describe plans to keep pace with the enlarging of the motion picture field before a real beginning is made.  But with youth in its favor, the Denver Art Museum hopes yet to see this art set in its rightful place with painting, sculpture, architecture, and the handicrafts—­hopes yet to be an instrument in the great work of making this art real as those others are being even now made real, to the expanding vision of an eager people.

    George William Eggers
    Director
    The Denver Art Association

    Denver, Colorado,
    New Year’s Day, 1922.

BOOK I—­THE GENERAL PHOTOPLAY SITUATION IN AMERICA, JANUARY 1, 1922

Especially as Viewed from the Heights of the Civic Centre at Denver, Colorado, and the Denver Art Museum, Which Is to Be a Leading Feature of This Civic Centre