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BETTY PARSONS GALLERY 
MODERN PAINTINGS

PLAZA 3-3456

24 WEST 57 STREET
NEW YORK 19, N.Y.

February 5, 1964

Dear Ad,

I didn't have a chance to call you after seeing the Museum of Modern Art show at the National Gallery in Washington. You are being shown in the same room with Modrian, Malevitch, and Albers, a far more respectable location than the "more advanced" painters who are hung with their immediate contemporaries. Surprisingly enough, the painting has tremendous presence in the gloomy bank vault lighting. The caption beside the painting tells how many squares there are and instructs the viewer to patient in finding them. No prize offered.

Your article from Art News is now posted on our bulletin board, a stern remonstrance to the commerce which passes before it. 

Enclosed is a description of our next show, a loose way of showing our artists in conjunction.
This was to have been a show built around the history of the gallery but it was postponed because of the delay in the publication of Lawrence Alloway's book.

I received a letter of inquiry from a gallery in Toronto from a pleasant, if inobtrusive, young man concerning an exhibition of your paintings in 1965. I realize your reservations about such exhibitions but I would like to see if his invitation couldn't include lectures at the University of Toronto where they have a spectacular Institute of Medieval Studies in which Etienne Gilson participates. Also, Northrop Frye whom I think is the most brilliant literary critic today is on the faculty. I think you would find a visit to the campus particularly congenial. Please let me know your feelings.

Thank you for your postcard. I was very impressed by "Flaming Creatures". It seems to me that any dramatic exposition consists in revealing a series of ironies which directly involve the tension between appearance and reality. This sort of revelation is at the heart of Shakespeare's comedies although they always affirm the natural order by a marriage or series of