THE ARTS

...I would not for a moment suggest that the National Academy of Sciences was motivated by the old anti-Communist passion...

...David E. Lilienthal, January 1948 Nixon's energy plan The energy crisis that confronts not only this country but this planet is that the United States, with 6 per cent of the world's population, now uses — and squanders — more than a third of its energy resources...

...The question is not Why did monumental sculpture run out of steam...

...January 21, 1911 Mixed blessing A principal danger to the people is that atomic energy in our own hands can become a threat to our basic liberties...

...But purges have long-lasting effects, and in public sculpture "advanced" academics like Berks are what is left as acceptable...

...I hold that government by one class, denying to other classes the right to participate, is tyranny...

...The three best pieces in the Capital are all works of this century and by Americans — the Adams memorial by Saint-Gaudens, Gutzom Borglum's equestrian statue of General Sheridan on the Circle of the same name, and, at the foot of Capitol Hill, Henry Shrady's ever-astonishing Grant memorial, possibly the best equestrian group produced anywhere in the world in this century...

...But The Post pounced and denounced and missed the point...

...Painters, sculptors, museum directors, and curators were all freely accused of being agents of the Stalinist conspiracy...

...It was probably just coincidence that the effect of all this was to frighten Government and institutional art commissioners away from the modern art they had commissioned quite freely during the New Deal years and to make Wheeler Williams and his friends of the National Sculpture Society the only absolutely safe sculptors for politically sensitive administrators...

...Dondero and his fellow art-inquisitors were fed their information by an outfit called the National Sculpture Society, whose principal voice was the sculptor Wheeler Williams, with a strong assist from the illustrator Howard Chandler Christy...

...The second is that the work establishes Berks as an academic sculptor attempting to pass himself off as modern by leaving his good likenesses in the rough-sketch stage and then casting and enlarging enormously, so that thumb twists of plaster come out as boulders of bronze...

...In public sculpture, the standard we are stuck with is that of the Kennedy head in the Kennedy Center and the laughable inner-court sculpture in the State Department — an unsexed giant figure having its pubic area constantly hosed down by streams of water, as if in an Army venereal disease demonstration...

...The proposed Einstein statue, seen from the street and a passing car, may well make that technique work, deplorable as the technique remains in itself...

...The Post found its scandal in an art story and went after it as if Nixon had come back as a sculptor...

...It is not the plotting and design of evil-doers, from without or within...

...Robert M. LaFollette Sr., January 1924...

...JFK looks as if he has some hideous skin disease...

...Obviously, the formal apparatus of political terror for sculpture is gone now, as it is for broadcasting, leaching, dockworking, letter carrying, and the host of other trades affected by the era that Lillian Hellman has appropriately dubbed Scoundrel Time...

...They have been edited only to achieve brevity...

...famed mathematician and physicist in bronze, three-and-a-half times life-size...

...During the great anti-Communist purges of the professions, trades, and occupations, one small corner of the bloodied field contained the plastic arts...

...But in public sculpture as in other fields, the memory lingers on...

...Representative George A. Dondero, otherwise a sober, even mildly valuable member of Congress, elaborated a theory that modern art as a whole was a Communist conspiracy designed to "addle the brains" (his words) of honest Americans, who, when their brains were sufficiently addled, would simply stand stupidly staring when the Red Navy sailed into New York harbor to take over America without firing a shot...

...The answer is now almost thirty years old — old enough for someone on The Washington Post to have heard about it...

...So long as the control of energy is vested in private hands for the sake of private profits, the crisis can only intensify...

...The Academy, for reasons of its own, has decided to raise more than a million dollars to pay for a sculpture of the Frank Getlein, a Contributing Editor of The Progressive, has written extensively on art and politics...

...Its chief art writer took off from a press conference about a statue of Albert Einstein that the National Academy of Sciences proposes to put up on its front lawn on Constitution Avenue, and proceeded to denounce the very idea of memorial portrait sculpture in our century...

...Newspapers have always done that, of course, but it has been a while since the need arose in Washington...

...The fact is that monumental sculpture in Washington is by no means dead in the Twentieth Century...

...June 1973 'The light of example' If I were a citizen of Russia, I should resist this Communist dictatorship as vigorously as I have resisted the encroachment upon our [own] democratic institutions...

...it lacks the energy...

...This malignant disease, known as phosphorous necrosis or "phossy jaw," is one of the hazards of the match industry...

...The sculptor is Robert Berks, best known in Washington for the monstrous head of John F. Kennedy that sits in the grand foyer of the Kennedy Center like an Aztec god-head brought to a boil in the Mexican sun...

...I told Russian officials that I believe in democracy, but I would not attempt to force a democracy on any nation, except by the light of example...

...Hazards of the match industry Few people can read about the effects of phosphorous poisoning without a shudder...

...As in other areas, these accusations were largely based on the accused having participated in anti-Franco rallies in the 1930s or having been overheard to speak out in favor of national health insurance or other Marxist schemes...

...Prices began going up and have continued to do so, though the projected million-plus for the Einstein statue must be a record of some sort...

...In terms of the basic "five Ws" of journalism, The Posfs scandal in sculpture ignored the one that is by definition the most interesting in most stories — Why...

...but rather Why do such institutions as the State Department and the National Academy of Sciences hire such klunks to do their super-extensive statuary...

...THE WAY WE SAW IT The following are excerpts from articles and editorials published by The Progressive since its founding on January 9, 1909...

...But this is a challenge the Nixon Administration is not likely to address...

...The other Ws are briefly told...

...America must be aware of a more subtle and ancient hazard: a disregard of the injunction that the blessings of liberty are only for the eternally vigilant...

...In the high old days of the Nixon Administration's decline and fall, the problem was not so much finding scandal as finding room for the scandal that came pouring in under the door, over the transom, through the air-conditioning system, like some all-pervasive hideous substance of a B-budget horror movie: Whispering Death from Whittier...

...In the process, he overlooked the most interesting — indeed, the only interesting — aspect of the case...

...The first problem with the Kennedy head is simply that it is impossible to get far enough away from it to see it...

...With legislators scrambling for a piece of the anti-Commie action, one obscure Michigan Congressman made the arts his own...

...Matches can be made from other substances that are not injurious to health, and manufacturers must be compelled to use the non-poisonous kind...

...Unless an author's name is appended, the material was editorial comment...

...In its way, Dondero's theory was probably the most extravagant tribute to the powers of art since Plato's time...