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Dear Betty:

In San Francisco at last through every kind of weather, and floods and sand storms to add variety to the rain and head winds. Here I find things well ordered and healthy. My children are very beautiful people. I hope you get to see them some day soon.

I send my regrets that so many interferences kept me from visiting you on the last Saturday afternoon. I hope that I can make up the loss. Especially did I want to see the picture of you. Perhaps you might get Monica to send it to me for a look. I would like it so. 

If Barney showed you some slides by Hassel Smith and you are finished with them I would appreciate it if you would have Monica send them to me or to Smith at the California School of Fine Arts. Seems that Monica is getting into this too darned much. Oh well, she is very useful I bet. 

As for Marks show I hope the best for all of you. It is the work of a very great man and I do not use the term with abandon. I consider myself one of the specially favored to know and be able to perceive this power and to have seen and I think understood its genesis and development. That is as far as an outsider can comprehend it. For it is unique and I know is completely misunderstood in its essence by some of Marks more vocal admirers and incorporators. This is a price we all pay for hanging work still called painting or pictures. But to stand beside and work with real greatness is not a common privilege.  To try to own it, kill it by explanation or analysis, is the most common of pastimes. What I think of it can be best explained by what I did to an organization devoted to such murder called the Art department of the Ohio State College. I described the incident in detail to Mark.

Please let me know what your travel plans are if you come this way during the summer. Meanwhile the best of luck to all of you. And many sales that we painters may paint.

Yours as ever

Clyff

800 Chestnut St
San Francisco

Schecter photos
Sent April 11th
1951
1951