Philadelphia's Fulop

Few artists, art critics or art patrons who do not live in Manhattan are quick to concede that that angular island is the art capital of the U. S. Yet it is to Manhattan that most U. S. art disputes, such as one which lately raged in Philadelphia, are taken for judgment.

About a year ago, ten public-spirited Philadelphians commissioned a Hungarian artist named Karoly Fulop, who lives in Paris, to paint five great murals for the music room of the Philadelphia Free Library. They did not consult the library trustees. They felt sure that Artist Fulop would produce something unquestionably suitable.

When three of the paintings arrived this year from Paris, the trustees bleakly refused to accept the gift. They gave no reasons, but Philadelphia art circles babbled with conjecture. The trustees were piqued at not being consulted, said some. They were being city-loyal, said others, and saving the work for some Philadelphia artist. Some people who took the trouble to view the Fulop paintings guessed that the trouble lay right there on canvas.

Huge, the pictures represent The Birth of Music. There are bells, babes, crucifixes, saints, sages, violins, all suavely rendered in a flat, decorative style. The colors of these allegorical figures pale beside certain swaths of silver paint and vividly Hungarian ornamentation. It is difficult to see the figures, to comprehend the designs.

The trustees refused to countenance even a temporary exhibition at the Library. So the Fulop patrons, acting anonymously through some attorneys named Saul, shipped the work to a Manhattan gallery, anticipated critical applause which, they hoped, would shame their mulish townsmen.

But when the Manhattan verdict came, last week, it could hardly have pleased the philanthropists. Excerpts:

Critic Royal Cortissoz of the New York Herald-Tribune: "Some imaginative ambition presumably is involved . . . but it has not been at all tangibly realized."

The New York World: "You may bulldoze part of the people part of the time, but you can't bulldoze Philadelphia trustees all of the time."

Critic Edward Alden Jewell of the New York Times: ". . . There are some big bells swinging--bells about the size that Mrs, Leslie Carter used to swing from, so long, so long ago, in Mr. Belasco's Heart of Maryland. . . . One adoring saint on the right is holding a violin . . . another is holding a baby that looks rather like another violin. . . . Although he calls them music and they were designed for the walls of a music room, there is nowhere visible a melodic line. . . . Let us say that it is a fairly good uprooted modern musical chord slurred and fumbled by a maestro who partook of too many cocktails the previous night."