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January 18, 1951

To the Editor of the New York Herald Tribune:

A critic of art is customarily assumed to be honest, regardless of whether we agree or disagree with what he or she says. It is taken for granted that he judges works of art on their intrinsic merits, and not on extraneous or accidental factors.

Miss Emily Genauer's review in your pages, on January 7th, of the memorial show of Arshile Gorky's paintings and drawings at the Whitney Museum provides cause to doubt her honesty in precisely this respect. As far as one can see, she deduces the largest part of her opinion of Gorky's art, not from the work itself, but from her opinion of his admirers, upon whose good faith she casts entirely unsupported aspersions. (Her only other specific objection to Gorky's art is its alleged derivativeness.) She refers to "the spectacle of his near-canonization by a small but influential group of art-world impresarios who may or may not have been so genuinely ravished by his work that they are already hailing him as the greatest painted America ever produced." And she asks: "Why, if his supporters believed in him so thoroughly, was he not able during his lifetime to enjoy wider sales and financial support?" Aside from her-- perhaps only half-mean--implication, that sales are a criterion of artistic merit, Miss Genauer assumes too readily that Gorky's admirers had the means to back their opinion by buying his work, when most of them, far from being "art-world impresarios," were, and are, fellow-artists with as little money as himself. As a journalist, if not as a critic, Miss Genauer owed it to her newspaper to ascertain the facts before venturing to impugn the good faith of any one, whether she named names or not.

Miss Genauer was guilty of a lapse in her Gorky review that had nothing to do with either art or art criticism. She wrote: "that possibly Gorky was more seduced than seducing." "That as I see it, is the great tragedy of Gorky, and a fact I find sadder than his suicide two years ago...." In other words, a man's art is more valuable than his life, and the supposed failure of his art sadder than his untimely death by suicide and all the suffering that must--inevitably--have preceded such a death. This is a piece of savage presumption and callousness that Gorky's friends resent, and which, more than anything else, is the reason this letter is being sent to the Herald Tribune. If Miss Genauer cannot be taught art criticism, she can at least learn decorum.

Respectfully yours,

Jeanne Reynal 240 West 11th Street