"Yiddish Hurdler"

When Sculptor Frederick William MacMonnies was commissioned (in the will of Mrs. Angelina Crane) to fashion a statue of Civic Virtue for Manhattan's City Hall Park, he modeled an upright youth spurning two coiled mermaids who represented Deceit and Disillusion. The unveiling in 1922 caused an unavailing delirium of protests from women's organizations and others which found, in the sex of Disillusion and Deceit and in their proximity to the youth's feet, an affront to womanhood. Glad of an opportunity to have fun, Manhattan newspapers exulted in lavish, impartial ridicule, made the incident one of Manhattan's most famed art squabbles. As late as 1932 Merchant Nathan Straus Jr. was writing to onetime Mayor James John Walker, asking the statue's removal.

Last week, under like circumstances, Rockefeller Center became the butt for town wits and art critics. Installed early last month in the Center's plaza was a huge gilt Paul Manship statue of Prometheus poised in a swimming pose on a mound and encircled by a ring carved with zodiacal symbols. Last week Essayist Christopher Morley in the Saturday Review of Literature wrote of it thus: "I am appalled by the Yiddish Hurdler on the new terrace of Rockefeller City. Under those glorious perpendiculars . . . this gesticulating gigolo in gilt. Besides he is just as immoral as the banished Lenin for the only possible interpretation is that he is escaping from a wedding ring. . . . I ... roared with laughter."

Quick to seize the similarity between the MacMonnies affair and the budding Manship incident, the tabloid Daily Mirror printed an imaginary conversation be tween the two sculptors' statues, head lined it "PROMETHEUS" BIG SISSY TO "CIVIC VIRTUE," promised to run further news of the "amazing wrangle."

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