No Bull This

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

I am considerably disturbed by the suggestion in Tuesday's CRIMSON, that the mural by Joan Miro now in the Graduate Centre, represents phallicism and obscenity alone. The dispute strikes very close to home, in fact, since a reproduction of the mural is now hanging above my desk, and may, without my knowledge, have been giving intolerable offense to the ladies who come to empty my ashtrays.

I should, however, be inclined to doubt those art students who have identified one of the central figures of the mural as a bull. I had not thought very much about the matter before this--I took it that the figure was just an unidentifiable animal with a pretty funny nose and a hat on. I think this thesis could be justified still--whatever the animal (if, indeed, it is an animal) has on its head looks more like a hat than it does like horns. Not an ordinary hat, I grant you--it has a sweeping brim and a tall crown. The animal is probably from Texas.

To save the susceptibilities of the delicate, I would like to suggest that the animal is a cow; certainly there are distinct traces of cow about it. It is well known that a cow is the most domestic and comfortable of animals. If it has any sex, it does not flaunt it. It might be said to maintain some sort of massive and conservative neutrality about the whole question.

May I hope that this solution will also aid those students who object to eating beneath what they suppose to be the tense and over-charged scrutiny of the mural? Once they know it is a cow, they can sit there and champ their boiled scrod and ensilage in peace. I really do not know that they could ask for anything better, unless it would be to eat underneath a plaster bust of Charles Evans Hughes.

At any rate, I shall continue to think the animal is a cow. I have enough trouble just keeping the radiator going in this room, without having to fight off the advances of an incestuous mural all through what promises to be a cold winter. William Hobart Dickey 1G