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(U.S.E.D., N.Y.D) FORM No. 11

WAR DEPARTMENT
UNITED STATES ENGINEER OFFICE
NEW YORK DISTRICT
ROOM 601, 120 WALL STREET
NEW YORK, N. Y.

REFER TO FILE NO.

April 16, 1943.


Mr. Reginald Marsh, 
1 Union Square, 
New York, N. Y.

Dear Reginald:

I shall be leaving for North Africa within a few days in charge of the Army Art Unit assigned to that front. Mr. Reeves Lewenthal, Executive Secretary of the War Department Art Advisory Committee, will take my place while I am away. As neither he nor I feel that we can with propriety pass upon the selection of art for exhibitions, publications and final ownership by the Government for a Federal War Museum Collection, I have named a committee to assist Dr. David Finley and Mr. Edward Rowan in such selections. I have invited Mr. Francis Henry Taylor, Director of the New York Metropolitan Museum; Mrs. Juliana Force, Director of the Whitney Museum of American Art; Mr. Duncan Phillips, Director of the Phillips Memorial Gallery; Mr. Paul Manship, sculptor, Mr. Leon Kroll, painter; and Mr. John Taylor Arms, print-maker, to serve on this Committee.

The Book of the Month Club has unofficially offered our Committee an edition of 600,000 volumes for any selections we may offer them. The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the National Gallery of Washington have generously tendered us their galleries for the initial exhibitions of the paints, sculptures, and drawings executed at the Foreign Theaters of War and on the Home Front by the men and women artists of America.

You will then have the unique privilege of showing your work --  your personal reaction to war in all its phases -- in galleries where are also hanging the great war paintings of Goya, of Delacroix, of Baron Gros, of Rubens. It is our Committee's hope that American artists will prove worthy of such an opportunity.

It is suggested that artists write journals and keep in touch from time to time with our Committee. The dramatics of war will probably prove less exciting reading for posterity than the minor tribulations, the hopes and fears and small things which will be noticed for the first time in Alaska or  Brazil, in the South Pacific, England, Africa or Syria.

For the Committee:

Ever sincerely,
George Biddle mt
GEORGE BIDDLE, Chairman,
War Department Art Advisory Committee.

[[stamp]]
FOR VICTORY
BUY UNITED STATES WAR BONDS AND STAMPS
[[/stamp]]