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strolls before highstooped rooming houses; casual groups are seen in shopping street or park; a drunken man lounges; young people dive from a North River pier. They are nobodies -- anybodies. Agglomerations of them crowd your Coney Island beach scenes and their very numberlessness testifies to their individual unimportance. But they are modeled in the Grand Manner! The forms in which they are presented are bursting with energy, expressed in the rendering of the turmoil of grotesque persons on the beach, by the drawing in the rippling skirt of the striding girl, in the modeling of the ornate housefront, and even in the design of the drooping bum, leaning on an elevated post.

Here is am ambiguity that counts for Art: the un-pretty, insignificant, small, seemingly selected from our 160,000,000 people for their very lack of importance, given, without distortion of aggrandizement, "important" form, and energy of presentation suggesting the heroic.

The tremendous response to your work, Mr. Marsh, implies, I think, that in this apparent contradiction, you say something about America -- something not obvious, but felt. We are not an "artistic" people, not searching for Beauty, not believing very much in individual importance, but believing in our energy, feeling its presence.

In expressing this difficult concept, then, you fulfill the fourth meaning of the word "graphic": "the vivid expression of an idea."

Joint Ceremonial of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the National Institute of Arts and Letters, May 26, 1954.