Among Senator Pells achievements listed in his
NYTimes obit was this:
Mr. Pell also was the author of the National Foundation of the Arts and the Humanities Act of 1965. That legislation paved the way for the National Endowment for the Arts, which makes federal grants to artists and arts organizations, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, which channels federal money in literature, history, language and philosophy, among other fields.
The creation of the National Endowment for the Arts did much over the years to foster avant-garde styles and techniques that made American artists renowned worldwide for work that Mr. Pell personally disliked.
“I don’t like abstract paintings,” he told an interviewer in 1996, saying he had no use for any artwork “more abstract than Picasso’s Blue Period.”
“I think that many of the grants made to artists by the endowment were mistakes,” he said, adding quickly, “But I’ll never intrude.”
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