Prix De Rome

Six young unmarried landscape architects bent over drawing boards for four weeks, competing for this year's fellowship in landscape architecture at the American Academy in Rome. Last week they were lodged in Manhattan's Grand Central art galleries. A large wash drawing of a colonial country estate and a sheaf of complementary sketches won the prize for Richard Coolidge Murdock, Cornell graduate, son of Architect Harris Hunnewell Murdock of Manhattan. Among his perquisites will be $1,550 a year for three years, $500 travel money, an airy comfortable studio on the Janiculum in Rome, entree into Roman diplomatic society, a 10% cash discount at either of Rome's student-favored liquor stores. A restriction: he must not marry during the three years of his scholarship. Great was Prizeman Murdock's publicity when the press discovered he is a distant relative of Calvin Coolidge, journalist.

After Goya

Near the height of artistic anonymity are those painstaking workmen in government office who scratch designs for postage stamps on metal dies. For every hundred philatelists who know the value of a one-cent postoffice Mauritius ($20,000) scarcely one knows the name of its engraver, J. Barnard. No such anonymity is the fate of Stamp Engraver Sanchez Toda, designer of the Spanish Goya memorial stamps which reached U. S. post offices last week. Cables carried his name round the world, foreign reformers held high their hands in horror.

Three of the 32 stamps in the Goya issue (11 1/2, 46-c-, $1.15) are reproductions of that acid genius Francisco Goya's best known picture La Maja Desnuda ("The Nude Maia"), a portrait of the bold, bare, buxom Maria Teresa, Duchess of Alba. The picture caused trouble when Goya painted it.* Trouble continued last week.

The stamps (29,800) were speedily sold. Letters from the facetious, protests from puritans flooded the Spanish Postoffice, the International Postal Union. Plaints ranged from statements that what is art in Latin countries is obscenity in the Nordic north, to threats of official proceedings against the Spanish Government for sending obscene matter through the mails. To the postal union wrote a Swiss zealot:

"An indecent picture is bad enough . . . but a postage stamp, whose back side must be licked! . . . Millions of innocent children collect stamps."

In Manhattan that expert in pornography, John Saxton Sumner of the Society for the Suppression of Vice, admitted sadly that he could do nothing about a stamp issued by the Spanish Government.

Pope Sits

In Rome last week one Guarino Roscioli, young sculptor, chiseled with Renaissance fever on a marble bust of and for Pope Pius XI. The commission was a result of His Holiness' good nature. He had seen a passable clay model which Sculptor Roscioli had made solely from photographs, had summoned the young man to correct some lineaments from a personal sitting.

*Hearing that his wife was posing in the altogether for the great Spanish satirist, the Duke of Alba swore that lie would paint Goya's picture in Goya's blood. Friends repeated the threat to the artist. When the Duke arrived unexpectedly at Goya's studio the next day he found his wife lightly but sufficiently clad in flimsy trousers, toreador's jacket, posing for another picture which sly Goya had stayed up all night to paint. Both pictures now hang side by side in the Seville gallery.

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