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May 24, 1949

Mr. Lawrence Kupferman
36 Ridgewood Street
Dorchester 22, Mass.

Dear Mr. Kupferman:

Your letter has been considered by the directors of our Association, and we are very much in hopes that you will reconsider your decision to resign from Artists Equity Association. 

You point out that the program of the Massachusetts chapter, like the program of the Association as a whole, has concerned itself entirely with non-political economic aims, and no one at any time has had any criticism of Artists Equity Association's engaging in any political activity. 

You mention a number of prominent New England members of your chapter, as well as prominent laymen and museum people who are interested in your program. I wish to point out that practically all of the important museum directors in the country have given us permission to use their names in connection with our Equity Fund Drive. Only last week our executive director, Mr. Hudson Walker, was on a program at the Art Institute of Chicago before the art section of the annual meeting of the American Association of Museums. Other speakers were Mr. Robert Beverly Hale of the Metropolitan museum and Mr. William Milliken, director of the Cleveland Museum. Mr. Walker read the resolution passed at the annual meeting regarding the problems facing museums and artists in connection with juried exhibitions, and Equity's suggestions were recieved with no opposition. 

Reactionary artists in recent months have gained the ear of a Congressman who self-admittedly knows nothing about art, and they are trying to disrupt all art activity, including the activity of Artists Equity Association, which is concerned with any but academic art. On May 17 Representative Dondero of Michigan, who made the previous attacks, include such Publications as the New York Times, New York Herald Tribune, the World Telegram, the New York Sun, the Brooklyn Eagle, the New Yorker magazine, the Art Digest, the Art News, and Pictures on Exhibition, as forwarned "Marxist art," and the speech contained the following ominous sentence: "It is not my purpose to suggest that newspapers should clap censorship on their art critics, but I do say that, if this condition of oveeremphasis and an attempt to glorify the vulgar, distorted, and the perverted has come about due to neglect and lack of proper supervision, then it is high time that some of our newspapers start cleaning house in the smaller compartments of their organizations."