Education: Fakes Unveiled

Harvard University last week owned up to art faking. Director Edward W. Forbes of Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum admitted that ostensibly bronze German statues stored in Harvard’s Germanic Museum are really plaster of Paris, painted.

The confession was provoked by the Cambridge City Council. Councilman Michael A. Sullivan, old foe of Harvard,* had persuaded from the Council an order to compel the University Overseers to surrender the statues as scrap metal.

*In 1939 Sullivan induced the Council to order Harvard, Radcliffe and M.I.T. to erase from thousands of books and maps the words “Lenin” and “Leningrad.” Mayor John W. Lyons vetoed the order. Earlier, the Council had called on the State Legislature to rescue Cambridge from a “deepseated conspiracy” of Harvard “disciples of Karl Marx.”