What Modern Art Is All About
Sir:
My heartiest congratulations to you [on] the Matisse feature in TIME, April 5.
It is way beyond a story on the show here; it is one of the clearest and best and most trenchant expositions of what modern art is all about. With your reproductions (in LIFE and TIME) you are doing for art what the phonograph and radio have done in popularizing good music.
FISKE KIMBALL
Director
Philadelphia Museum of Art
Philadelphia, Pa.
Sir:
... I think that now that the war is over, your Art editor should run out and get some new parts for his head.
I don't claim to be any expert critic of art, far from it. But I do think . . . that drivel that you print as Art by Matisse stinks. His masterpieces look like the work of a patient in a mental institution. . . .
LAURENCE E. SHAPIRO
Waterbury, Conn.
Popovers
Sir:
TIME'S human touch last summer in presenting Mormon Leader Smith as "slyly popping bonbons into his mouth" drew apt approval in Letters. Now in a single issue [March 29] we find Music-Maestro Ormandy and Ball-Bingler Crosby popping peppermint and peanuts into their mouths.
Let TIME beware lest this popping turn into corn.
RUDOLPH FIEHLER
Seguin, Tex.
P: Shucks.--ED.
Academic Assurances
Sir:
YOUR OTHERWISE FINE ARTICLE ANENT THE ACADEMY OF MOTION PICTURE ARTS & SCIENCES 20TH ANNUAL AWARDS [TIME, MARCH 29] WAS MARRED BY THE PHRASE "MINOR PRIZES." PLEASE BE ASSURED THAT ALL ACADEMY AWARDS ARE EQUAL IN IMPORTANCE AND THE ACADEMY DEPLORES THE TENDENCY TO DIFFERENTIATE. . .
HOWARD G. MAYER AND ASSOCIATES
Public Relations Counsel
Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences
Chicago, Ill.
P: Let Reader Mayer & Co. be assured that the deplorable public's major interest is in the major awards.--ED.
Sinister Still
Sir:
. . . I'm convinced you have somehow put the wrong cut-line under the picture of five men you claim to be "stalwarts" of the House un-American Activities Committee. . . . That picture [TIME, March 29], for my money, is a still shot from one of Alfred Hitchcock's spy-thrillers. . . .
The faces are the calmly arrogant, anonymous faces Hitchcock always found for his sinister antagonists. Looking at them, as they stand casually in the restless sunlight before the familiar white clapboards of an ordinary house in a peaceful city, you are suddenly chilled beyond belief. You realize, swiftly, that they are not the friendly, ordinary men they pretended to be all along. . . . The bland face of the short, portly man in front--obviously the leader--has become set, purposeful, inscrutable, and his hand is all at once in the pocket of his grey suitcoat. The faces of his henchmen, grouped carelessly around him, convey the same ominous mood. . . . They stand there, waiting, and their purpose is clear. You want desperately to call for help, but you know it's no use. The house is empty, the yards and streets are deserted, and the entire city around you is friendless and cold. . . .
It must be a Hitchcock still shot, that's all. It can't be Mr. Thomas and his Committeemen. . . .
JUNIUS EDDY
Madison, Wis.
Sir:
As an old Jersey boy, I will never be able to drive through Allendale again without the thought of that quintet standing like the boys used to stand in front of the roadhouses along the Jersey shore, flush with the success of another load of hooch ashore the previous night, while an obliging cohort snapped their picture. . . .
ERICH H. SCHULDT JR.
Champaign, Ill.
Myths & Milk
Sir:
Your fairly accurate account of Mrs. Riddle and Avon Old Farms [TIME, March 22] repeats a myth, unjust to the memory of a headmaster of the school who suffered for ten years under her devastating domination, and ended broken in health and mind. His name was not selected from the telephone directory; he was suggested for the position by the dean of a theological seminary in New York. . . .
I believe that Mrs. Riddle did use the telephone directory to find a dignitary of the church in a position to make nominations, as the educational world would have none of her.
(REV.) WARNER F. GOOKIN
Oak Bluffs, Mass.
Sir:
As an alumnus of Avon Old Farms, class of '36, I ... resent your calling Avon "a fancy prep school for rich kids"; it was nothing of the sort. . . . Avon was a school especially designed to develop individual tendencies in every boy who went there. By the system of "Community Service" at the farm, stables, in the woods, in the garage, in the power house, in student government, etc., each student was taught something practical, along with studies and sports. The school was MEANT to be entirely different from Taft, Choate, Kent and all the rest, which tended to turn out "types." As for the "rich kids," let me tell you that only a mere handful of the 90-odd boys there during my three years paid the full $1,500 tuition then asked.
... It is perhaps true that Mrs. Riddle was very dogmatic in many of her views; it is equally true that your magazine takes a most dogmatic attitude, unjustified and childish, in presenting the history and present status of Avon Old Farms.
DONALD R. HART JR.
University of Richmond Richmond, Va.
Sir:
. . . This article states: "Mrs. Riddle provided a blooded herd (one Guernsey cow cost $60,000) for the instruction, etc."
According to my knowledge there is no record of any Guernsey cow having been sold at either public auction or private treaty for any such figure. ...
R. W. BLAKELY
Pulaski, N.Y.
Sir:
. . . The highest priced Guernsey ever sold was Gardenville Coronation King, which we sold last June ... for $45,000. The record price for a female is Shuttlewick Levity, sold in 1924 for $25,500. . . .
In the summer of 1925 I offered Mrs. Riddle $20,000 for Anesthesia Faith of Hillstead, whose record of 19,741 milk, 1,112 fat was then the record of the breed. My offer . . . was declined, and the cow died without ever having another calf. When Mrs. Riddle founded Avon Old Farms she by no stretch of the imagination owned a cow worth $60,000 or one-tenth as much.
Louis McL. MERRYMAN
Sparks, Md.
P: TIME'S Education researcher certainly milked the wrong cow.--ED.
Gory Story
Sir:
. . . My little boy, Michael, aged four, witnessed a collision between a taxi and a black touring car at an intersection near our home. In relating the accident later that evening to his uncle, this, somewhat condensed, is how Michael described the event:
"The black car smashed in the taxi-car and pushed in the wheel badly and the taximan was mad and the other man was mad. And then a big black dog came along and he was a BIG dog. He eats little children. And the taximan took that great big dog in his taxi-car and he took out a knife and he cut out both the eyes of that bad dog. And then he took the dog to jail and he killed him, dead and the blood was running all over and that was the end of that bad dog."
My little boy does not read comic books, believe it or not. He does not even look at the pictures. . . . How would Dr. Wertham adapt this into his theory that increased juvenile delinquency is a result of reading too many comic books [TIME, March 29]?
It occurs to me that Dr. Wertham takes a child's mind too seriously. ... I doubt very much if the goriest comics will cause a healthy, normal child to develop into a delinquent. A child's fascination for blood and torture existed long before comics were ever invented. . . .
SAM YOUNG
San Francisco, Calif.
Party Line
Sir:
At the request of Professor Eugene V. Tarle, of Moscow, U.S.S.R., I am forwarding to you the enclosed letter.
EARL BROWDER
New York City
Sir:
I have learned, to my great surprise, that you question the authenticity of my signature to letters and articles which have appeared in the American and British press [TIME, Jan. 12]. . . .
Everything that has appeared in your country and in Great Britain under my name was written and signed by me. . . .
Should you chance, however, to read an article bearing my signature, that contains enthusiastic praise of Mr. Dewey's speech calling for war, which he delivered in Boston on February 13th of this year ... in that case I earnestly beseech you not, on any account, to believe the authenticity of my signature.
EUGEN TARLE
Member of the Academy of
Sciences of U.S.S.R.
Moscow
P: Reader Tarle is talking, like a good Communist, through his astrakhan hat. TIME never questioned the genuineness of his signature; nor could any American mistake his letters for anything but pressagentry for the Kremlin. -- ED.
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