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May 6, 1982

Dear Phil,

Sorry I kept this so long. It's really a fascinating document, because, foolishly, I never imagined the meaning of Picasso for Frank's work. I say foolishly because once he says it, it is plain as day - and here I have been asleep. But it's more the recent - post-1978 - works that are close to Picasso than the once we saw in Ft. Worth. I have now seen only 3 or 4 more recent things, the last ones at the Graham Goud collection exh. in Boston a month or so ago. Two interesting things: one - how many followers there are, group trying to pick up on what he's been doing the last 6 years, and how uniformly bad they are; the other is that the closest parallel is between Frank and Red Grooms - structurally similar (I'm thinking of a kind of small relief like piece by Grooms in the show), although Frank is more adventurous (it's more his concern), but also with a very similar antic imagination.

Another thing about [[strikethrough]] its [[/strikethrough]] his talk is its disingenuousness. It seems to me he has always hidden what his art is about (at the same time that he seems to reveal everything, like - genuinely - about Picasso). In this case, where he speaks of all the things that abstraction can't do or should try to learn to do, he's really talking about all the things he has striven for - and accomplished - in his own work - without the figure and until recent years