"Sick in the Head"

Munich has been the scene of a bitter engagement between those age-old foes--Radicals and Conservatives. The Minister of Education took advantage of a recent law (retiring government officials about the age of 65) to oust six conservative professors from the Academy, including the Director, Karl von Marr, American-born. Said Professor von Marr: "These ultra-Modernists are mentally afflicted. They are sick in their heads, and the more I see of their work, the more I become convinced of the fact. Most of them are incapable of learning the simple mechanics of drawing, so they splash their canvases with every color of the spectrum and call it inspiration." The many, many people who subscribe to the sanctity of tradition-in-Art have rented a studio for von Marr so that he may continue to teach them. The six professors, as one man, declared that "it makes no difference whether an artist is 65 or 25. A young man may express a musty spirit in his work, and the older man one that breathes the ardor of youth." Von Marr reversed the usual order of things, for he emigrated to Europe to seek his fame and fortune, and became the first and only State-employed professor of painting of American birth in Germany. Some of his paintings hang in the Munich Kunstverein.