Modern Museum

Like a great mausoleum the Metropolitan Museum of Art over an acre of Central Park in Manhattan, facing houses of the rich on Fifth Avenue. Inside are many tombs--tombs of Egyptian Pharaohs, of exalted bric-a-brac, of Art. In the art tombs are laid away examples of the work of the great painters and sculp- tors of other times. There are Rubenses, Rembrandts,* Rodins, Titians, Tintorettos, Tiepolos, scores of time-proven mediocrities, one Botticelli. Progressive artists throughout the East have long given up hope for modernity in the Metropolitan. Few of them ever visit its vaults. Scathingly they view it only as a trysting place for shopgirls and their beaux, a shelter for nurse-girls and babies on rainy days, a "point of interest" for out-of-towners. It is the only official museum of art in New York City. Last week art circles were stirred by news that Manhattan is to have a U. S. Luxembourg.* Spurred by the fact that in Cleveland, The Hague, Rotterdam, Worcester and all great art-conscious cities except New York, there are museums which exhibit contemporary art, a committee of seven art collectors and patrons planned and announced a Museum of Modern Art, to open in October with an exhibition of the sires of today's "modern" art: Cezanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Renoir. The committee has leased a gallery-sized room. For two years they will show the pictures of contemporary European, Mexican and U. S. painters and sculptors, culled from the artists' studios, loaned or given by patrons, loaned or sold by dealers. The neighborhood of the Heckscher Building is the greatest art-mart in the world. After two years the Modern Museum plans to build its own building. Pledged for generous donations are many patrons who are waiting to see "if the thing is a success." Willing to take a chance, the committee of seven has already given the impetus-money. They are: Chairman Anson Conger Goodyear, Buffalo lumberman, onetime president of Buffalo's staid Albright Art Gallery, now an enthusiastic patron of modern art. Treasurer: Mrs. John Davison Rockefeller Jr., patron, collector. Secretary: Frank Crowninshield, smart-art arbiter, editor of Conde Nast's Vanity Fair.

Beaux Arts Prize

Every January, Manhattan, social, artistic and theatrical, dons fantastic costume and goes to the aged Hotel Astor to make merry. All night they dance in the ballroom and cavort in the corridors, disturbing the sleeping guests. Around 9 a. m. the masqueraders have a pick-me-up breakfast and go home. This is called the Beaux Arts Ball. The proceeds go for the partial support of the Beaux Arts Institute of Design. It uses the money for studio upkeep, paying instructors, sending promising students to Europe. Every year the Institute awards a scholarship to that young student of any U. S. architectural school who best solves a problem in architecture. This year's problem was a monument to the Spirit of the West. The winner is a Kansas City clothing merchant's son. The Project: Symbolizing the vigor of the West, the winning design is of a great stone shaft rising out of a mass of carved pylons flanking its base. At the front of the monument a heroic pioneer figure faces west, overlooking a vast plateau, a lagoon, a city. The north and south approaches are long avenues of modernized totem poles, each pole telling an historical anecdote in sculpture. The Winner: Prizeman Joseph Denis Murphy, 23, is the designer of the shaft-monument. His ancestors are Irish farm- folk. He is the oldest of six children. His first ambition was to design automobiles, but after high school he went to Rockhurst College in Kansas City and studied architecture. Afterward he went to Massachusetts Institute of Technology and spent a summer in Fontainebleau, France. He is an amateur water colorist and etcher, dreams of building the world's tallest building in modern architecture.

* Said the late Critic Wilhelm von Bode: "Rembrandt painted some 700 pictures, of which about 3,000 are now in existence.'' * The Luxembourg in Paris is a testing ground for pictures. After ten years in the Luxembourg a picture may be transferred to the august Louvre.