The Educational screen (c1922-c1956])

December, 1925 Among the Magazines and Books 593 lions (generally in profile) can easily be tested, and one is immediately struck by the truthfulness of the portrait medallion of the Prince of Wales. It is explained that the method of procedure is first to take a photograph of the sitter while lines are being projected on the face. The curvature of these lines of latitude and longitude — similar to those on a map — are then the cunning controllers of the 'carving machine,' which proceeds to do the rest. As an eminent sculptor remarked some time ago: 'Yes; very good indeed; but this machine can not perform that priceless thing — the touch of erring genius — and that is where I come in!'" THE pictorial pageant, prepared by the John Wanamaker Store in honor of the three hundredth anniversary of the purchase of Manhattan Island from the Indians, is described in The Christian Science Monitor: This tercentenary celebration takes in the past, present, and the future of the "Titan City." In the old Wanamaker building, the pictorial history of old New York is told in a series of 88 panels, running chronologically on the three upper floors, and in a group of enormous transparent paintings on silk by Willy Pogany, displayed in the Stewart Rotunda. These Pogany panels stretch toward the roof for fully 75 feet, and with powerful illumination from behind, glow like great stained glass windows. The central painting is the artist's fanciful concept of the metamorphosis of New York City, a comp-^site view of lower Manhattan Island beginning with the untroubled sandy shores where the Indians beached their primitive craft, continuing through successive and ever-mounting sky lines until the present day towers of lower New York appear, and finally mounting still higher with strokes of sheerest fantasy into a Jules Verne vision of a New York of the future. The two great side panels, recalling in their dimensions the prodigious mural efforts of the golden days of painting, deal with various aspects of modern progress, the left-hand one showing the evolution of trafl&c from the lumbering oxcart to the swiftly skimming vehicles of to-day, while on the right is a sweeping panorama of marine transportation boldly sketched against a deep blue sea and sky. The artist has realized his decorative aims more clearly in the two side panels, and has created his designs with a greater freedom and invention than in the composite view of New York. Bordering these spacious bepraisements of progress are full-length portraits ranged in double tiers of the men who have made New York what it is today. many of these likenesses amusingly adapted from old prints and portraits. There are such notables present as Henry Hudson, Peter Stuyvesant, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, Seth Low, Theodore Roosevelt, Cornelius Vanderbilt, J. P. Morgan, Whitelaw Reid, Samuel Gompers, John La Farge, A. T. Stewart and John Wanamaker, some fifty-odd Titans of New York taken from the various branches of civic activity. The pictorial history of Little Old New York, that runs its interesting course over three floors of the original Wanamaker Building is more conspicuous for its descriptive qualities than for its decorative aspect. A certain few of these panels have been treated with more regard for artistic values than the rest, but for the most part it is the subject matter that really counts. The first designs show the original Four Hundred, the manner of their dress and habitations, and the first distinguished foreigner to pay them a visit. From these gentle pastoral views which caused this same Henry Hudson to exclaim, "A very good land to fall in with, and a pleasant place to see," the pictured tale reveals the purchasing of Manhattan by the Dutch for $24 worth of baubles, the first log palisades built by Peter Minuit, the New Amsterdam of 1642 and its first famous buildings, then the beginning of the "lace and powder" period of an English regime, the changing landmarks of the pre-Revoluntionary city, with its mingled Dutch, English, and early American types of architecture, the building of the first brick church and the Second Trinity Church, then the later nineteenth century St. Mark's-in-the-Bouwerie in 1836, Castle Garden in 1835, La Grange Terrace, the new omnibuses and horse cars, the Stock Exchange in 1850, the Grand Central Depot in 1871, the first elevated railroad, Genin's Bridge, etc. The pictorial pageant that occupies the main galleries of the new building deals entirely with the New York of the future. This part of the tercentenary celebration has been carried out under the direction of Harvey Wiley Corbett, one of the recognized authorities on city planning. He has commissioned Hugh Ferriss, that brilliantly imaginative artist-architect, to design a series of murals for the rotunda on the first floor depicting the coming city under the providential restriction of the new zoning laws. Instead of masses of blunt, boxlike structures blotting out light from the streets in the old way and shunting skyward in dreary monotony, Mr. Ferriss works out his visions with marvelous new masonries of today and tomorrow, all alert and elegant, ascending gradually in intriguing steps and levels, topped with graceful t§rraces and towers. >; .