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2.

for those ptgs that drove Clem & Michael up the wall more than anything else he said or felt about me. There they knew he was wrong.

But in the end that doesn't really bother me; they're more than welcome to their rightness. What bothers me is that I might not find a way to deal directly with what is really great about those paintings & after all those are really the paintings of my time. They deal squarely & incredibly successfully with abstraction, esp. as you've laid it out in the essay, & on top of that they have that economical, radical edge which gives Michael so much leverage. They stay powerfully abstract & pictorial without having to have recourse to engineering, even if it is pictorial engineering. It raises it seems to me almost inevitably & excruciatingly the question - why pictorial engineering, if you can do so much with pictorial painting? I guess I'm saying here that Louis is the anomaly, & I wish he were El Greco!

I don't know the answer, & I can only say that my sole satisfaction has come from the fact that, at least, I found a way to get away from them a little & work comfortably on my own. But you & I both know that Michael wouldn't be very tolerant of working comfortably & that nothing short of successfully meeting a challenging straight abstract pictorial painting would be considered worthwhile ("fruitful") and meaningfull.
Love
F.

Transcription Notes:
done fixed some words and added a line that was inadvertently left out