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“It is an amazing thing that we can become so interested in art discussion that our ‘sibyl war’ has widened art appreciation,” Dunlap wrote in 1934 before stepping down as president because of the controversy.

It was deemed a line straight to God — staggering, the voice of an enchantress, a sibyl, a siren.

Why did he go to so much trouble when the finished sibyl is mostly clothed and must be viewed from a considerable distance below?

But not even a sibyl could have made sense of those tiny scraps of paper.

Since the mid-1980s, Ms. Cook has reigned as a kind of sibyl channeling the wisdom and humanity of the American songbook, particularly as embodied in the work of Stephen Sondheim.