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Regarding the pitiful "wolf boy" story in your Feb. 15 Press section, they have the wrong "animal" hospitalized in Lucknow. It should well be the doctor-superintendent, to be gaped at, poked, and made to howl and moan. Admission: free.
MRS. JACK MOYLE Idaho Falls, Idaho
The Going Price of Nudes
Sir:
In your Feb. 15 discussion of the Tate Gallery's affairs, when you refer to the charge that "the Tate trustees had sold good paintings, bought inferior works at inflated prices," you do not specify what they sold, what bought. Actually what was lately sold was a nude bather by Renoir, whose popularity in contemporary America you document in your color spread in the same issue. They sold it for $16,800 . . . and their principal purchase from this money was Picasso's cubist Seated Nude Woman (1910).
We yield to no one in admiration of Renoir and actually have 29 of his works, of all periods, presently hanging. But paintings and painters do gradually use up and outlast their popularity ... In 1950 we here accepted the gift of Picasso's Nude Woman (1910), closely equivalent to the Tate's purchase. A 57th Street dealer tells us the going price for it would be $25,000, if anything equivalent were attainable−so a price of, say, $12,500 for the Tate Picasso would scarcely be at an inflated price . . .
FlSKE KlMBALL Director
Philadelphia Museum of Art Philadelphia
* As told in Harry Kemp's Tramping on Life: As Kemp was about to move out with Sinclair's first" wife, the aggrieved husband thrust her coffeepot upon him, saying, "You. can take this to your goddess, this poison machine, and lay it on her altar."