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Every January, Manhattan, social, artistic and theatrical, dons fantastic costume and goes to the aged Hotel Astor to make merry. All night they dance in the ballroom and cavort in the corridors, disturbing the sleeping guests. Around 9 a. m. the masqueraders have a pick-me-up breakfast and go home. This is called the Beaux Arts Ball. The proceeds go for the partial support of the Beaux Arts Institute of Design. It uses the money for studio upkeep, paying instructors, sending promising students to Europe. Every year the Institute awards a scholarship to that young student of any U. S. architectural school who best solves a problem in architecture. This year's problem was a monument to the Spirit of the West. The winner is a Kansas City clothing merchant's son. The Project: Symbolizing the vigor of the West, the winning design is of a great stone shaft rising out of a mass of carved pylons flanking its base. At the front of the monument a heroic pioneer figure faces west, overlooking a vast plateau, a lagoon, a city. The north and south approaches are long avenues of modernized totem poles, each pole telling an historical anecdote in sculpture. The Winner: Prizeman Joseph Denis Murphy, 23, is the designer of the shaft-monument. His ancestors are Irish farm- folk. He is the oldest of six children. His first ambition was to design automobiles, but after high school he went to Rockhurst College in Kansas City and studied architecture. Afterward he went to Massachusetts Institute of Technology and spent a summer in Fontainebleau, France. He is an amateur water colorist and etcher, dreams of building the world's tallest building in modern architecture.
* Said the late Critic Wilhelm von Bode: "Rembrandt painted some 700 pictures, of which about 3,000 are now in existence.'' * The Luxembourg in Paris is a testing ground for pictures. After ten years in the Luxembourg a picture may be transferred to the august Louvre.