Ecclesiastical & Icelandic

While members of Chicago's Union League Club strove last week to find a successor to Calvin Coolidge (see below), members of New York's Union League Club hustled the nude figure of Paul Robeson to the club librarian's office.

Once yearly the dusty, mid-Victorian Union League, a semipolitical (Republican) organization with some social pretensions, pays its respects to Art with an exhibition to which members may bring their wives and daughters. Advertised as chef d'oeuvre of last week's exhibition was the lifesize, specifically nude bronzed plaster cast of Paul Robeson, Negro baritone, Shakespearean actor, onetime Rutgers football star, which Sculptor Antonio Salemme sent last summer to Philadelphia, which it shocked (TIME, June 30). For most of the summer it has been on view at the Brooklyn Museum of Art.

Union League members viewed nude Paul Robeson with horror last week, rushed with complaints to portly, whitechinned Dr. George Frederick Kunz, gem expert of Tiffany & Co., chairman of the club's art committee, who summoned Sculptor Salemme.

"It is a beautiful piece of art," said Dr. Kunz, "but such realism is out of place in this salon."

Sculptor Salemme dutifully applied a plaster figleaf as a poultice to outraged sensibilities. The members of the art committee viewed the amended Robeson, sadly shook their heads.

Salemme's Robeson was removed the night before the exhibit opened. To reporters suave Dr. Kunz explained that the statue had not been removed on racial or physiological grounds. "It wasn't that at all," said he.

"It was because this turned out to be an ecclesiastical show; ecclesiastical and also Icelandic. We have a full length portrait of Cardinal Hayes, one of Bishop Stires by Frank O. Salisbury, one of Rabbi Wise, and three of Bishop Manning. Obviously the nude figure of Robeson would have been inappropriate.

"It is absurd to think that the club might rule out the Robeson figure on racial lines. Do you know of any other club that employs all Negro waiters and servants?"

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