Good Old England

After half a century of hemming & haw-hawing, the Royal Academy at last admitted that modern, school-of-Paris art might be art. To let Britons judge the stuff for themselves, the academy last week opened a show of France's top moderns. Among those best represented were Utrillo, Rouault, Braque, Chagall, Leger and Matisse*--all of them old men now. Critics and the earnest students who jammed the exhibition rapturously agreed that it was great. But the old guard closed ranks, fixed bayonets, and refused to surrender.

Horse-Painter Sir Alfred Munnings, 72, a onetime president of the academy, sounded an opening bugle offstage. He advised would-be visitors to "have a good stiff brandy & soda before you go. In fact, take a flask in your pocket." Lord Horder, 80, famed as King George VI's doctor and currently president of London's Cremation Society, declared himself "quite willing to stuff the canvases into the crematoria. I think I should be doing a public service." Aged showgoers hissed such epithets as "hideous!" "unutterable!" and "sacrilegious tommyrot!" One bewildered old boy in a bowler growled that the paintings were just "like French politics--hopelessly muddled up."

To the old guard's conscientiously up-to-date children, such John Bullish opinions sounded like a scratchy old John McCormack record.

To every sniff, hiss and boo they responded with rousing "Ahhs!" All in all, the exhibition raised a splendid ruckus.

It was, said the Daily Express, "as though the Brooklyn Dodgers had invaded Lord's," the sanctum of Britain's sacred game of cricket.

*Because some of his Communist cronies had been barred from attending a blood-Red "peace" rally in Britain (TIME, Nov. 20), Communist Picasso refused to send anything. Lacking prickly old Pablo, the show struck Critic John Russell of the London Sunday Times as rather like "a toothbrush without its bristles."

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