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PHILLIPS MEMORIAL GALLERY
1600 TWENTY-FIRST STREET
WASHINGTON, D.C.

DUNCAN PHILLIPS, Director
C. LAW WATKINS, Associate Director
ELMIRA BIER, Manager of Publications

May 3, 1933

Mr. Arthur G. Dove,
Halesite,
New York.

Dear Arthur Dove:

I am having a grand time enjoying the paintings from your last exhibition which Stieglitz was good enough to send down so that I could study them at leisure. I want to write an article about your work for which I have the greatest sympathy and admiration. There is an elemental something in your abstractions. They start from nature and personal experience and they are free from the fashionable mannerisms of the hyper aesthetic and cerebral preciosity of Paris. Your color thrills me and also your craftsmanship in the making of sumptuous surfaces and edges. It is a sharp distress to me that I cannot get three or four of the pictures that were sent down. Unless I succeed in selling a valuable painting which is now under consideration at a museum, I may find it impossible to get more than one and would even have to ask your indulgence in paying for that. The Sun Drawing Water seems to us all to have the largest number of fine qualities, but the best passage of painting you have ever done is contained in the painting entitled "The Bessie of New York". Perhaps I am presumptuous but I wish the picture had been cut off a little to the left of the center. I am sending herewith a photograph to show the part which seems to me complete and a better composition than the painting as a whole. There is too much orange in the complete canvas and I am disturbed by the suggestion of eyes in the superstructure of the boat. For me the picture is a thrilling landscape with fascinating forms, lines and colors and the humorous feature introduced with those eyes spoils my enjoyment of the real universality and nobility of the conception. Of course the picture made into an upright as I suggest would lose some of its compositional interest in the double curve etc., etc. But I ask you to consider the two photographs and let me know whether you would be willing, in case I should decide to get this picture, to let me make this change in the shape. If you would, it would be my first choice and my favorite example of your work. There is just enough of the orange to serve as an accent and all the colors resound in a perfect harmony. Should you feel that the orange needs to be repeated somewhere else there could be a mere suggestion of it above the gray roof in the rather large area of tan. I certainly hope that I am able to raise money so that I can keep at least two of this fine group. Some day you must come to Washington and see the Dove Room in our house. The newer works are now all assembled in my office. I congratulate you