Pioneers

In the small village of Elmwood, Ill., there occurred last week a praiseworthy event. In a park the Girls' Glee Club sang "Illinois" and "America the Beautiful"; many "midwestern pioneers" over the age of 75 and old residents of central Illinois sat cheerfully in a grandstand. Several persons, including famed Sculptor Lorado Taft, made speeches. Then there was unveiled a bronze group statue, The Pioneers, by famed Sculptor Taft.

Elmwood, Ill., was the town in which Sculptor Taft had spent his boyhood.* Proud of their well-known onetime citizen and proud too of the pioneers, less spectacular but no less hardy than their pacemakers beyond the Mississippi, who came long ago to settle in the "middle border," Sculptor Taft conceived the idea of making a statue for the village green, requiring for his work no payment. It was nonetheless necessary for Elmwood's 1200 denizens to raise $17,000 to pay for the material costs of the statue and the cost of erecting it. This they did.

The bronze group well rewarded their efforts. Ten feet high, on a granite base, it shows a young pioneer couple. The man has a gun, the woman a baby. Side by side, they stand looking in the direction of the possible peril. The park around the statue is neat and luxuriant. No other U. S. village the size of Elmwood has yet shown the wisdom or the ability to adorn itself so well.

Andromache Besieged

Incensed against censors, many persons have pointed out that if legal authorities are permitted to judge of obscenity in contemporary works of art, there is no consistency in depriving them of the right to pass upon old works of art which are still in circulation. Thus it would be logical and just for a warden of morals to take exception to many passages in Shakespeare, to large chunks of the Holy Bible. An expert upon nude statuary might condemn, and rightly condemn, the Venus de Milo.

Last week, in Manhattan, John S. Sumner, head of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, saw a picture in a window which aroused his righteous rage. The picture was the celebrated Andromache at the Siege of Troy, by Antoine Georges Marie Rochegross. Grotesque and terrible, it depicts Hector's wife at the moment when she is being dragged away from Troy for the pleasure of Neoptolemus, son of Achilles; her little son, Axtynax, is being yanked away from his mother by a brutal soldiery. The nude body of a nymph lies prostrate in the foreground. When his eyes were assailed by this dreadful representation, John S. Sumner whistled with dismay and wrote as follows to Nathan Levy, the art dealer in whose window the Andromache had been conspicuously hung:

"It is extremely probable that sadistically inclined perverts may be aroused to undesirable activities by such a display in a public place. . . ." When newsgatherers approached him, John Sumner enlarged upon his diatribe: "Sadism is a form of sexualism. This painting is very apt to arouse sadistic impulses. Also it is placed where children can see it. . . . If it were prosecutable, I think there should be prosecution and I feel that the law should be interpreted to cover such things. . . ."

The manager of the Imperial Hotel in which Mr. Levy's store is located reinforced Mr. Sumner's objections. Andromache was speedily removed from the window.

A Thousand Flowers

Sixteen pieces of Gothic tapestry, loaned to the Metropolitan Museum of Art by their owners, were last week hung for the public to look upon until the middle of September. Of the 16, all fabulously costly and all curiously beautiful, six were the most beautiful and the most costly. These were the pieces in the series called The Hunt of The Unicorn, owned by John Davison Rockefeller Jr. Their worth was greater than $1,100,000; millefleurs tapestries, their backgrounds were filled with flowers.

Mediaeval persons, who had not quite escaped the cheering madness which makes savages discover in every stone an emblem, in every wind a god, imagined the unicorn, a strange single antlered creature which no one had ever seen, as a symbol for purity. It was a rare beast as well as one unreal; to capture the unicorn, one must first capture a virgin and induce her to sit still upon the ground. The unicorn, attracted by a purity akin to his own, might come and lay his shaggy, frightened head upon her lap. Then hunters might come up and kill him with their spears. In the legends written in ancient bestiaries only two hunters pursued the timid freak: one of these was Gabriel and the other was his Lord. The seven virtues were their hounds.

In the woven chase, God and Gabriel had more than these companions. A jovial company of gentlemen, urging great horses and blowing on golden horns, were riding, running, through a wilderness of flowers. Their meek quarry fled through the brilliant fields; behind him, silent and happy, the pursuit increased and came more quickly; a wind stiffened in their flags and made the starry flowers bend across the grass. The white hounds leaned upon their leashes and the bowmen bent their bows. Crouching in a garden at last, the prisoned unicorn gazed upon his followers. They levelled spears amid a thousand flowers.

This queer, shining allegory which was hung up last week for gum-chewers to look at and connoisseurs to appreciate, was threaded together at some time near the middle of the 15th century.

*Urchin Taft lived in Elmwood because his father taught school there; it was after his father, Don Carlos Taft, left Elmwood to be professor of geology at the University of Illinois, that young Lorado gave precocious and legendary birth to his interest in sculpture. A crate containing a cast of the snake-grappled Laocoon Group came to the university. Dismayed to find that the art object had been smashed in transit, 12-year-old Lorado who had accompanied his father to superintend the uncrating, seized the fragments and fitted them cleverly into their proper places, a feat his father had been unable to accomplish. Sculptor Taft's most famed work is probably the Fountain of Time on the Midway, Chicago.