Moses Speaks

Famed for parkways and playgrounds, tempers and tirades, is New York City's able Park Commissioner Robert Moses. This week, Park Commissioner Moses, an ex officio member of the boards of all the museums in New York's public parks, sent a report, characteristically caustic and cogent, to Mayor LaGuardia on the present state of the city's museums. Sample criticisms:

> "Museums have a natural tendency to become musty, and this tendency should be combated. In the combat some trustees must change fixed ideas, some must become a trifle more liberal in their outlook, and others must stop patronizing public officials."

> "There have been great men in the history of our museums. The second and third generations of Morgans, Davisons, Osborns, Roots, Rockefellers, Webbs, Fricks, Blums, and others, now appear on the roster. The founders of the older museums were strong-minded, opinionated, dictatorial men with a curious one-sided sense of public obligation. All the larger American cities had them--mostly new millionaires determined to show that they could bid Duveen more per square inch of canvas and cubic inch of marble or bronze than any European competitor."

> "The board of a museum is not a House of Lords nor yet an exclusive social club. There must be less emphasis on wealth, old family, and big-game hunting. . . ."

> "There are still altogether too many employes, technical and otherwise, who have outlived their usefulness and who should retire. An attendant need not be an eager salesman, but he certainly shouldn't act like a grumpy night watchman disturbed in his slumbers."

> "Why should a group of ultra-conservative trustees of the Metropolitan take it upon themselves to decide that the year 1900 or some other magic date in the past represents the end of art so far as they are concerned, and that the collection of some sour Sienese madonnas is more important than the stimulation of living artists?"

> "I don't know why the American Indian must have a home in several museums, not to speak of two entirely separate foundations, one known as the Museum of the American Indian . . . and the other a sort of branch of this institution known as the Heye Foundation, occupying a large area in an utterly unsuitable location in The Bronx. I have passed the Bronx institution frequently and at all hours, and have never yet seen anyone go in or come out of it."

> "The New York Public Library . . . needs a director who stands for something significant in the world of letters. We have men of letters who could make something more than a depository of books out of our greatest central library. . . ."

Lifelike were the comebacks of at least two "dead" institutions under attack. Retorted the Readers Association of the New York Public Library: "The ill-conceived statements of the ex-bridge builder and fish remover betray an ignorance of . . . the purposes of this greatest of our free democratic institutions of learning. The purveyor of parks and parkways will have to prune his budget considerably if he desires to compare his services with those of the library, which costs New York 52-c- per capita." Bristled the "dead" New York Historical Society (open to the public but privately endowed): "His statement that the society had Egyptian objects duplicated by the Metropolitan and Brooklyn Museums indicates that it is a long time since Mr. Moses or any one else representing him was here, because this collection was transferred to the Brooklyn Museum in 1937."

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