Sacramento daily record-union. [volume] (Sacramento [Calif.]) 1875-1891, 1890-07-08
MOCK MoDEsTy.

The Directors of the Detroit Museum OF
Art have demonstrated their entire unfit
ness for their positions. In response to the
silly and ludicrous demand of certain Miss
Nancy nasty particular people, they have
ordered the plaster casts In the museum to
be draped in costumery modern and farci-
cal. These people, who are so fearful that
other people will be shocked and their
morals corrupted by viewing the Apollo
Belvidere, the Gladiator and the Venus
de Medici as they are craven in marble,
seem to overlook the fact that if their pro-
test against the so-called "nudeu in satu-
airy is good for anything at all, it ought to
secure the destruction of casts of the order
referred to, because of the well-known fact
that the figure half draped or the statue
clothed is more suggestive than entire
nudity; that to drape a craven figure is to
suggest at once that it should never have
been modelled.
Casts of the figures that have made the
prudes of Detroit so angry, are to be found
in the Art Gallery of this city. From five
hundred TO thousand people visit the
gallery monthly, and the figures in exhi-
bition seasons run up to twenty and thirty
thousand. Yet in no instance has any one
been shocked or the moral sensibilities or
the sense of propriety been ruffied In
tho p1idct IF fboca haapfif,l xynrl-e IS 49,
IN the last five years, three hundred modest,
lady-like and pure girls and women, and
some forty or fifty lads and young men of
gentlemanly department and correct hab-
its and good home training, have studied.
They have transferred to paper and can
vas the lines of these figures, and made
their classic poses the subjects of weeks of
patient study for reproduction in light
and shade effects. Yet not one of all these
young people have felt the tinge of blush
because of the art works viewed, nor have
their morals or their tastes been in the
slightest degree corrupted or given par
ticle of warp. On the contrary, their
tastes have been refined and their whole
being bettered by the study.
The purists of Detroit would find them
selves sadly put to, in getting about in
Europe, if they were to close their eyes to
all representations of the human figure in
architecture, painting, sculpture and bas-
relief in the nude or partially nude. In
fact, they would have to grope through
the Old World blindfolded, and for the
matter of that they would find it difficult
in these later days to walk in the streets
and parks and gardens of the cities of our
own country with their eyes open. These
sentimental cranks are too good for this
world, or too vulgar in their own thoughts
for association with the decent people of
the day. We suspect these goody -goody
beings. They are too profuse in their de-
clarations of modesty and purity; they are
altogether too solicitous that others should
not be corrupted. The chances are that
their own bringing up has been so de-
fectiye that they are incapable of dis
tinguishing between the pure and the i'm
pure The probabilities are that these
same ultra-sensitive people find no harm
in the "bussing bees" so common out
iers indulge in promiscuous kissing and
hugging and indecent handling of human
forms