The Naked Maja

Under the 7 1/2-year rule of Postmaster General Arthur Summerfield, the U.S. Post Office Department has become a sort of latter-day Watch and Ward Society. As part of an all-out antismut crusade, Summerfield tried to ban Lady Chatterley's Lover from the mails (TIME, June 22), succeeded only in helping that tired old novel to the top of the bestseller list. Last week Summerfield's men were wrestling with another lady, Francisco Goya's masterpiece, The Naked Maja.

The fight began last March, when United Artists mailed 2,268 postcard reproductions of the painting to editors, film and record distributors as a promotion stunt for a film about Goya and his great and good friend, the Duchess of Alba, supposedly the model for The Maja. The Post Office took one look, pronounced them obscene and seized them.

Delighted that an ordinary publicity stunt had been blown up into a national sensation, United Artists fought the case. In a hearing last April, Post Office Examiner William A. Duvall upheld the ban. The Goya original, he conceded, "is a masterpiece, [and] nudity is not obscene." But Duvall argued that United Artists had sent out a poor reproduction. Said he: "It is a copy of a photograph which does not accurately depict that which it purports to show ... It is simply a color picture of a nude woman."

The film company appealed the decision. Last week, answering the suit, the Justice Department completely scuttled the Post Office Department's case by admitting that "the postal cards at issue are neither obscene, lewd, lascivious nor filthy." United Artists has only to go to court and ask that the case be thrown out--a request no judge could deny.

In point of fact, Arthur Summerfield's antismut cause is a good one; the mailing of pornography, especially to school-age youngsters, has become a serious problem. But by seeing smut where none existed, Summerfield had once more become an unwitting promotion man for professional publicists. Sighed a Summerfield aide: "We are just the fall guys in a publicity campaign."

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