Art: Welfenschatz

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To New York last week went the lot of them, where Messrs. Hackenbruch, Rosenbaum & Goldschmidt hope to recoup their five millions. As a starter they sold six pieces to the Cleveland Museum of Art, invited Cleveland's museum director plump, polite little William M. Milliken, to lecture on the exhibit's opening day as chief customer.

Apart from its great intrinsic value the Guelph treasure fills a great gap in the history of art as shown in U. S. museums. Wise purchases and liberal gifts have made the U. S. comparatively rich in Egyptian, Classical, Gothic, Renaissance and Modern. Of that whole period from the 4th to the 13th Century referred to by Victorian professors as the dark ages, U. S. collections have scarcely anything but a few fragments of Romanesque sculpture, an occasional porphyry column or bit of mosaic. This period is completely covered by the Welfenschatz. Earliest of the pieces is an 8th Century enamel plaque bearing a pop-eyed head of Christ. Latest is a silver relic cross made in 1483. Most important artistically is a casket reliquary in the form of a Byzantine church of gold, walrus ivory and brilliant enamel which once held the dried skull of St. Gregory.

Proceeds of last week's exhibit will go to a non-sectarian organization known as Big Sisters. Present on the opening day in their shiniest toppers and most brilliant jewels were such latter-day Guelphs & Ghibellines as Otto Hermann Kahn, John Hays Hammond, Philip Lehman. Jules Semon Bache, Alexander Hamilton Rice, Miss Lizzie Bliss, Lady Mendl, Leonard C. Hanna Jr.

Peter Arno of the 1890's

The National Academy of Design, U. S. Art's most venerable institution, last week opened the chaste doors of its annual exhibition just after the Academy's president, white-haired Architect Cass Gilbert (Woolworth Building) had faced a radio microphone and announced:

"This is the finest exhibition of American pictures, sculpture and etchings that has ever been held in New York, taken all in all.

". . . The day of the long-haired artist is gone. The present day artist is likely to be a well-dressed, well-set-up man in a tweed suit with well polished shoes and a smart tie, moving with quick athletic step . . . looking more like a man of affairs than a dreamy esthete. . . . The Academy now needs ample gallery space, so that every good picture can be hung and every good piece of sculpture can be placed."

For the first time in 105 years, this year's show was limited to work by members and associate members of the Academy. Nobody objected. Critics looked at 391 works of art, all by Academicians, found praiseworthy a canvas by Way man Adams, some prints by Albert Sterner, John Taylor Arms, Gifford Seal, and a sculpture of bantam cocks by Mahonri Mackintosh Young.

Most newsworthy exhibit was a huge canvas that never got into the exhibition proper at all, was hung apologetically in the lobby. It was a picture of four bleary-eyed topers in a club smoking room, entitled "Speaking of Prohibition." It was painted by that famed oldtimer, Charles Dana Gibson.

Explained a member of the hanging committee:

"It is artistic but exceedingly facetious. It is in a comic vein not exactly in keeping with the exhibition as a whole."

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