Welfenschatz

New Yorkers who had $1 and the inclination were given opportunity last week to inspect 82 objects that made up the greatest collection of medieval art ever to come to the U. S.--one of the greatest in the world--the Welfenschatz or Guelph Treasure.

Guelphs and Ghibellines are names familiar to historians, confusing to the laity. Guelph comes from hwelp or whelp, meaning a wolf's pup, and Ghibelline is an Italian attempt to pronounce the name of the counts of Waiblingen.

Both families emerged from the primeval sludge in what is now Bavaria and Wuerttemberg, first attracted attention about the 9th Century as merchants, bankers, warriors, finally ruling princes, but always as rivals. The later Guelphs were backers, supporters of the Papacy. The Ghibellines backed the Holy Roman Empire. In time the names were applied indiscriminately to adherents of either Papal or Imperial parties.*

Founder of the present collection was the Guelph Duke Henry the Lion, who died in 1195, left his son Otto IV the collection of gold and jewel-studded relics which grateful Eastern emperors had given him in Constantinople. Otto IV donated the treasure, adding more himself, to the Cathedral of St. Blasius which Henry the Lion had built in the city of Brunswick. Other Guelphs did likewise, bought saints' bones, holy skulls, jeweled monstrances, candelabra, etc. etc. After 300 years of this the Guelphs felt that they had collected enough. Ten years before America was discovered they made an inventory which might well serve as a catalog of the exhibition shown in New York last week. Until ten months ago the entire Welfenschatz remained in Guelph hands, property of the Dukes of Brunswick, Guelph descendants.

Last of the reigning Dukes of Brunswick is H. R. H. Ernest August Christian George, Duke of Brunswick and Lunebourg, Prince Royal of Great Britain and Ireland, who married the Kaiser's daughter Victoria Louise in Berlin in 1913. He was forced to abdicate from the Duchy of Brunswick in 1918, has long been reputed one of the richest men in Germany, still maintains a sort of royal court in the Austrian province of Styria. Maintaining a private court runs into big money. Last year H. ex-R. H. announced that the Guelph treasure was for sale. The city of Hanover attempted to buy it, was unable to raise the money. The Duke of Brunswick, descendant of the Popes' most zealous defenders, sold the treasure to a group of three dealers: Z. M. Hackenbruch and J. Rosenbaurn of Frankfort; Julius Goldschmidt of New York, for approximately $5,000,000.

Messrs. Hackenbruch, Rosenbaum & Goldschmidt immediately put the Welfenschatz on public exhibition, first in Frankfort, later in Berlin. Seldom in the past 800 years have people been permitted to see it. Railways ran excursions from all over Germany, from France, Hungary, Poland. Day after day the museums were crowded with throngs of the artistic, anxious to admire the work of Romanesque and Gothic goldsmiths, of the pious, eager to venerate the skeleton arms of St. Lawrence and St. Sigismund, the skull of St. Blasius, the finger of John the Baptist and other anatomical remains.

To New York last week went the lot of them, where Messrs. Hackenbruch, Rosenbaum & Goldschmidt hope to recoup their five millions. As a starter they sold six pieces to the Cleveland Museum of Art, invited Cleveland's museum director plump, polite little William M. Milliken, to lecture on the exhibit's opening day as chief customer.

Apart from its great intrinsic value the Guelph treasure fills a great gap in the history of art as shown in U. S. museums. Wise purchases and liberal gifts have made the U. S. comparatively rich in Egyptian, Classical, Gothic, Renaissance and Modern. Of that whole period from the 4th to the 13th Century referred to by Victorian professors as the dark ages, U. S. collections have scarcely anything but a few fragments of Romanesque sculpture, an occasional porphyry column or bit of mosaic. This period is completely covered by the Welfenschatz. Earliest of the pieces is an 8th Century enamel plaque bearing a pop-eyed head of Christ. Latest is a silver relic cross made in 1483. Most important artistically is a casket reliquary in the form of a Byzantine church of gold, walrus ivory and brilliant enamel which once held the dried skull of St. Gregory.

Proceeds of last week's exhibit will go to a non-sectarian organization known as Big Sisters. Present on the opening day in their shiniest toppers and most brilliant jewels were such latter-day Guelphs & Ghibellines as Otto Hermann Kahn, John Hays Hammond, Philip Lehman. Jules Semon Bache, Alexander Hamilton Rice, Miss Lizzie Bliss, Lady Mendl, Leonard C. Hanna Jr.

Peter Arno of the 1890's

The National Academy of Design, U. S. Art's most venerable institution, last week opened the chaste doors of its annual exhibition just after the Academy's president, white-haired Architect Cass Gilbert (Woolworth Building) had faced a radio microphone and announced:

"This is the finest exhibition of American pictures, sculpture and etchings that has ever been held in New York, taken all in all.

". . . The day of the long-haired artist is gone. The present day artist is likely to be a well-dressed, well-set-up man in a tweed suit with well polished shoes and a smart tie, moving with quick athletic step . . . looking more like a man of affairs than a dreamy esthete. . . . The Academy now needs ample gallery space, so that every good picture can be hung and every good piece of sculpture can be placed."

For the first time in 105 years, this year's show was limited to work by members and associate members of the Academy. Nobody objected. Critics looked at 391 works of art, all by Academicians, found praiseworthy a canvas by Way man Adams, some prints by Albert Sterner, John Taylor Arms, Gifford Seal, and a sculpture of bantam cocks by Mahonri Mackintosh Young.

Most newsworthy exhibit was a huge canvas that never got into the exhibition proper at all, was hung apologetically in the lobby. It was a picture of four bleary-eyed topers in a club smoking room, entitled "Speaking of Prohibition." It was painted by that famed oldtimer, Charles Dana Gibson.

Explained a member of the hanging committee:

"It is artistic but exceedingly facetious. It is in a comic vein not exactly in keeping with the exhibition as a whole."

Academicians need not have been surprised at a controversial picture from Charles Dana Gibson. Now bald and 63, he was the Peter Arno of the 1890's. From his nervous, scratchy pen sprang that sensational figure, the Gibson Girl, a majestic creature with an imposing pompadour, large bust and perfect Grecian profile. Women 35 years ago who did not look like Gibson Girls attempted to do so, just as their mothers had imitated the swanlike ladies of Punch's Illustrator John Leech, as their daughters ape the rowdy sirens of Peter Arno.

A far gentler satirist than Leech or Arno, Artist Gibson seldom made fun of the Gibson Girl herself. Occasionally in the drawings which made Life the most popular humorous weekly in the country and brought Artist Gibson enough money to buy the magazine from its former owners, the Gibson Girl would exhibit fear of mice, embarrassment at the shortness of her bathing skirt, or a tendency to buy extravagant dresses. But for the most part the Gibson Girl remained the goddess of a sentimental generation, admirable always. It was through the strange minor characters that surrounded her that Artist Gibson was "exceedingly facetious." The Gibson Girl had a formidable mother who was forever trying to marry her to titled foreigners with beards and ribbons across their shirtfronts (the marriage of Consuelo Vanderbilt to the Duke of Marlborough was a sensation of the decade). She had a wizened little father by the name of Mr. Pipp, who became Artist Gibson's most successful character. She had a number of suitors who were either too fat or too thin, wore reefers with enormous pearl buttons, and killed chin-bearded farmers' chickens by driving their Stevens-Duryeas recklessly on country roads.

The four guzzlers in "Speaking of Prohibition" were exactly in this mood of gentle satire. Actually, Prohibition is a subject on which Artist Gibson feels most strongly (witness Life's altruistic crusade last spring). But these four quaffers were not drunk, just pleasantly "fried." Their faces could be found in any Gibson album of 30 years ago. Observers found a curious old-fashioned touch in the fact that one of them, looking like a younger Mr. Pipp, was apparently imbibing hot scotch with lemon, a British beverage almost unknown to the Prohibition generation.

*Just to make Guelph-Ghibelline history more complicated, though the Guelphs were defenders of the Papacy, Ghibellines of the Empire, Guelph Otto IV was elected Holy Roman Emperor.

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