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33 East End Avenue
New York, N. Y.
August 20, 1945

Mr. Germain Seligman
5 East 57th Street
New York, N. Y.

Dear Mr. Seligman:

The three enclosed carbons speak for themselves, and this is confidential to you, and I want to gain your valuable opinion before venturing into such a nation wide program of showing my latest paintings.

I'll give you my word of honor I had no more idea of doing painting than jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge for I was writing a novel and a book of essays and occasional poems, and felt happy that my sense of color went in my writing. My wife wanted some pictures hung and I got them from the warehouse. Then I found that one needed a touch of color, and as I had not painted for six years it annoyed me to see it left undone. I had a palette knife made and took a couple of slaps and hit the color. Mrs. Crosby wondered how I used the palette knife on trees and I began to show her. Then I got some small canvases to try out strokes and I hit a fishing scene in twenty minutes. Then I knew that the painting had returned. My wife liked one of gulls and I wondered if I got the paper in Paris so I ordered water color paper and found I got it from Fredericks. Then the rest of it you know. It just came whether I wanted to do it or not and that's where I am.

I am getting all these new pictures framed and I have one or two that I made over six years ago. I think I've got something that I never had before due to this six year layoff, and I make so bold as to say nobody can touch me on the movement. It's all movement.

Now, as you know, it's a most delicate thing to put such an exhibition in charge of anybody when I don't know what's happened through the years, and the letters speak for themselves. If that Modern Art is part of Miss Lambert's racket, then she's out. She's good, but she has to be held down sometimes, and such an exhibition