Sculptor Troubles

P:Out of San Antonio, Tex. last week rumbled one of the last vans full of plaster and clay models of sculpture by Mountain-Carver Gutzon Borglum, who closed up his studio and left Texas for good last month after the contract for San Antonio's greatest memorial, the Alamo Cenotaph, was awarded not to him but to pudgy Sculptor Pompeo Coppini. During the twelve years he called San Antonio his home, big-eared, irascible Sculptor Borglum never finished a Texas job. A hater of cheap politics since the fiasco of his Stone Mountain project in Georgia, Borglum's wrath at Texas boiled over on the subject of the Texas Centennial. Wrote he from Mount Rushmore, S. D., where he is finishing his colossal head of Lincoln: "What is it in Texas that fights and resists any plan to deal with her history . . . with the nobility, honesty and dignity that befit a great people?"

P: In St. Louis, controversy raged over designs by Swedish Sculptor Carl Milles for a $60,000 fountain in Aloe Plaza across from Union Station. Last February aged Art Dealer Francis D. Healy, chairman of the Municipal Art Commission, first saw clay models of Sculptor Milles' Wedding of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers reproduced in LIFE, grumbled that the fountain group would be better named "Wedding in a Nudist Colony." Commissioner Hubert Hoeflinger, onetime tailor, agreed that the Milles tritons should be trousered. Awarded a contract in April 1936, and warmly supported by other members of the Commission, Sculptor Milles worked on serenely in Detroit last week while a St. Louis Star-Times poll of public opinion showed 152 votes for the statues. 552 against them. Excerpts from replies received:

"Having had a human form all my life, I am used to it, and therefore I am not shocked by it."

"With immorality running as high as it is, the Milles nudes would be as bad as teasing an already enraged beast."

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