Art: Tempest in a Fountain

In Aloe Plaza, outside St. Louis’ Union Station, a crane last week deposited 19 excelsior-padded, jute-swathed statues on the pavement of a waterless fountain. The bulky packages looked like mummies but were the livelier fragments of a long controversy (TIME, Aug. 9, 1937; June 6, 1938) over nude statues in general, these in particular. They were the figures for famed Swedish Sculptor Carl Milles’ Wedding of the Mississippi and the Missouri—known locally as Wedding in a Nudist Colony.

Before the virile male figure of the Mississippi and the nubile female Missouri, each followed by a lolloping train of Naiads and Tritons, can face each other, in the fountain’s splashing centre, they must be set in place, unveiled. Coming to do the first, stocky, soft-voiced Carl Milles, 64, ran smack into an argument about the second. Sculptor Milles, who had refused to fig-leaf his statues, also refused to commit himself on whether the fountain should be unveiled as soon as finished or not until next spring.

Republicans (the city administration is Democratic) suggested that, if the nudes were kept draped through the winter, the city might charge 10¢ a peek and so liquidate its record $3,332,000 deficit. Art lovers wanted the unveiling put off till spring, when the plaza would look more verdant and hopeful. Barrel-chested Mayor Bernard Francis Dickmann last week gathered himself together and chose a December date. Director of Streets and Sewers Frank J. McDevitt objected to the whole thing, on the ground that motorists would look at the nudes instead of watching where they were going. But St. Louis art lovers reflected proudly that, whenever the figures are unveiled, a Carl Milles fountain will be well worth a few traffic accidents.