Gods of the Congo

What, precisely, are these fantastic

African wood carvings that have been making such a stir in London and

Paris and are now penetrating New

York? Are they new examples of ancient art just brought to light or are they a new art, like ragtime or glee-singing--the contribution of the colored race to the present generation?

They are neither. They have been exhibited for years in museums, under such captions as "Idols, war implements, and kitchen utensils of the Cyzon Congo" or "Early Hardware of the Singanbrains." Now someone has discovered in them a definite artistic value.

These figures look like nothing in the world, but that precisely was the artist's purpose. He wanted to make a god, not a man, a thing complete and unique in itself, not a presentation of what he saw.

But are they as valuable as it is claimed? Certainly they have had a distinct influence on modern art. But Clive Bell, one of the sanest of modern critics, says that he intends "to keep his head" about Negro art. He maintains that they show taste and skill, but not profundity of vision, and that they lack originality, duplicating without question the conventions of their predecessors for generation after generation. In other words, the Negro art, which has been too much ignored, is now in danger of being equally overpraised.

In Buda Pesth, at the sale of a private collection, was discovered a lost painting by Titian.

A statuette, thought to be 60,000 years old, is being exhibited in Paris. It is a woman's figure carved in the stone age from the tusk of a mammoth, and was discovered in a grotto at Lexpugne, Haut-Garonne, France, by M. de Saint-Pelier.

The French government, having heard that the Impressionist Manet's famous painting, Le Bon Bock, was in Paris en route to America, planned to put an embargo on it, but found the law did not apply--since the painting was acquired in Germany. It represents with sympathetic warmth a gentleman, a cafe table, a glass of beer. It will be exhibited shortly in New York.

The Metropolitan Museum acquired a portrait by the earliest known painter in America, Gustavus Hesselius, a Swede, who settled in Philadelphia in 1711.

An enthusiastic tipsy Tyrolean in Zurich, falling in love with Peoppel- man's statue of Spring in a theatre lobby, tried to carry off the maiden in his arms, but she fell and crashed to ruin. Realism has seldom had such a testimonial.