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Gorky

DOROTHY C. MILLER
12 EAST EIGTH STREET
NEW YORK, NEW YORK 10003


July 11, 1978

Mrs. Ruth Bowman
10701 Wilshire Boulevard
Los Angeles, California 90024

Dear Ruth, 

Many thanks for you letter of July 6th. I did get to Stockbridge for two weeks but succeeded in only a minimum of rest. 

It is fine that Sam wanted copy negatives of the photographs you found in my files. Perhaps it will be safer for you to hold the original photographs to return to me later since I will be out of New York again and I have difficulty receiving mail, particularly packages. 

Of course you may include the brochure “Art as a Function of Government” in the exhibition, as well as Gorky’s handwritten essay on the Newark murals. I think the latter should be framed which will be possible because it is written on one side of the eleven sheets only. 

I am glad Newark is reconstructing the model. In my mind’s eye, I always see that model in bright color instead of black and white. Would it be possible to use the existing watercolor studies as a color guide to the lost panels? Of course if we did this, we would have to explain how the colors were arrives at in the model. 

The press release of November 10, 1936 which you found in my files and of which you sent me a copy, can be explained I think as part of an announcement of the first section of our circulating exhibition of the “New Horizons in American Art.” I find I have no copy of the itinerary of the “New Horizons” exhibition, but I have you a copy of it and you can check to see if the first stop was Newark as I believe. I think the quotation from the press release which you sent me indicated that the same finished panel which we showed in “New Horizons” also went to Newark. The model must be what the first sentence of your quote refers to as “the airport murals…are being displayed for the first time in Newark to the public.” We have to remember also the this paragraph may [[be just]] bad exposition on the part of some newspaper writer.