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December 14, 1952

Dear Rosenberg:
Your article in the Art News was brought to my attention and I must apologize to both you and myself for suggesting a few years ago that if you could become informed you might make some kind of a contribution to raising the level of Art Criticism from the swamps of its present lethargy. I will grant that when compared to most contributors to Art criticism your discussion was readable. And ignoring the obvious sources of your ideas your commentaries were at least Sophomore College Instructor level. For this you deserve credit.

But without checking through the patent psychological errors, your ignorance of even recent Art History, the conspicuous dialectical slanting to collectivist premises, or your unfamiliarity with the most common data of aesthetic and philosophic contributions, I am downright ashamed of you, and it is because of the obviousness of your motives.

I thought any intelligent man would hold to the rigor that when a hatchet-job is undertaken his respect for the most elementary craftsmanship would cause him to carry out his crime with some finesse. One just does not shit on the floor, break furniture, indulge in eighth street gutter epithets after trying to impress ones public with the moral and intellectual principles of a reformed salon raconteur. Whether it is due to your basic impotence as a creative writer, your envy of the few artist men who can and do walk with courage in a day when only mice are considered men, or whether your vanity and need for praise, regardless of the source, caused you to drop your guard, I cannot know. But this I do know: you proved yourself an intellectual lout, and betrayed the motives which drove you to your specious attack on institutions, your desire for the role of stooge and front man for the mass assault on the individual, and probably worst of all your complete incompetence to carry out even an elementary skirmish on a truly objective and aesthetic plane. I am deeply disappointed.

Most sincerely,
Still

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[Clyfford Still]