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New York, N.Y.
January , 1944

Trustees of the Whitney Museum of American Art
8 West 8th Street
New York, N.Y.

Gentlemen:

When the announcement came last year of the closing of Whitney Museum of American Art each of us experienced a deep sense of disappointment and loss. The unexpected reopening of the Museum this fall brought back to us a renewed sense of Whitney's significance. The re-opening was marked by an extraordinary feeling of sentiment and affection. It was as though we adventiously [[adventitiously]] found ourselves back in a home which we thought we had lost.

The tie was between most museums and the living artist is usually a tenuous and impersonal one. The traditionally role of the museum has so long been that of a repository for the art of the past that it has recognized the existence of the living artist only with seeming reluctance or not at all.  Museums now tend to exhibit his work, sometimes award him a prize and more rarely make a purchase. But the pervasive feeling which the average museum has tended to communicate to the living artist has been one of aloofness and relative disinterestedness.   

With the Whitney that has never been the case; and to the Whitney belongs the major share of the credit for the liberal treatment which living American art has received from most other American museums. Since its opening the Whitney has set the pattern in this country for what a museum may do for the art of its own period. From its Whitney Studio Club days, through its various developments up to the present, it has been the greatest single force in support of living American art in the United States.

The Whiteney has always treated the living American artists with sincerity and respect. It did not award prizes. Instead, it set aside a fund each year,