We promised our readers in the last issue a detailed report on the "Autumn Exhibition of Painting and Sculpture," and we do not yet know whether art — any art — can ever receive its full due of study and examination!

What is beyond doubt is that there is in Lebanon today a blessed artistic renaissance which is receiving wholesome care. Has the soil, one wonders, first been prepared, and the conditions of growth provided, so that we may look forward, tomorrow, to ripe and delicious fruit?

This is the fifth exhibition of its kind, sponsored by the Arts Department in the Ministry of National Education and Fine Arts — that Ministry whose voice was never heard until the day these seasonal exhibitions began, inviting the public at large to the UNESCO Palace to witness that Lebanon keeps pace with the advanced countries of the world not only in its intellectual renaissance but in its artistic renaissance as well. And have the intellectual and artistic renaissances ever marched except side by side?

And is this artistic renaissance, whose first glimmerings we perceive in our exhibition today, anything but the echo of the intellectual revolution whose blaze has raged unabated since the late nineteenth century? Paris was the starting point of that revolution, and from it it seeped out and spread to the countries of Europe. From Europe the students of art, from West and East alike, drank their fill, and carried back with them to their countries burning sparks. Before long the fire of revolution had flared up everywhere: agitated minds, a striving to devise the new, and weariness of

the monotony

"The Lebanese Village" by Omar Onsi

"Return from the Spring" by Youssef Howayek

"The Forest" by Sonia Harris