Art: Metropolitan Duped, Flayed

Squat and monstrous, Manhattan’s Metropolitan Museum lies grimly along Fifth Avenue like the palace of some dour despot. But the men who choose its collections are not stonily infallible. Recently one blunder was exposed, many blunders alleged.

Alceo Dossena lives in Rome, where for years he has sculped in Classical and Renaissance styles. With the secrecy of an alchemist he produces the effect of century-long erosions on his statuary. Alceo insists that he is only a copyist. But he has a Greek Athena in the Cleveland Museum, a Renaissance tomb in the Boston Museum, a chastely draped Grecian maiden in the Metropolitan. The guardians of all these palladiums have been duped. Now they are chagrined.

But Copyist Alceo annoys the Metropolitan much less than Manhattan Critic Walter Pach, who recently published a book called Ananias (Harper’s). Biblical Ananias lied to God. Artistic Ananias deceives himself and the public, lies to Apollo. He paints handsome, superficial canvases for popular and social success. U. S. museums, states Critic Pach, are full of them, particularly the Metropolitan.* What rather should happen is the cultivation of public taste by impact with fresh, live modes of expression.†

Whether or not Critic Pach’s salvos affected Metropolitan dictators, they announced a February auction of 200 paintings of an evidently admitted stupidity.

-Modern artists flayed as Ananiases: John W. Alexander, Alma-Tadema, Bakst, Blashfield, Bonnat, Allan Clark, Kenyon Cox, Daniel Chester French, Gerome, Laszlo, Manship, Mestrovic, Sargent, Lorado Taft, Zuloaga.

†Modern artists praised: A. L. Barye, Brancusi, Cezanne, Courbet, Degas, Delacroix, Derain, Eakins, Frueh, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Winslow Homer, Manet, Monet, Picasso, Pissarro, Poiret, de Chavannes, Renoir,