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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

September 28, 1933

Mr. Arthur G. Dove,
Geneva, Route III,
New York.

Dear Mr. Dove:

I am just back from Pennsylvania and find your letter which I hasten to answer. You will remember that I pr omised to send the one hundred dollars we owe you, over and above the monthly checks for fifty dollars, any time when it was most needed. What you tell me about the storage bill makes me feel that a check would be timely and I send it herewith. Incidentally what you say about the pictures in storage makes me wonder whether you couldn't make a selection of the best for an exhibition in our Gallery. Or even whether you would care to have us store them for you and make our own choice for an exhibition. We would of course pay the transportation provided there are not too many paintings and that they are already adequately framed. We could hardly afford the expense of making new frames for them just for the sake of the exhibition as we start the year practically without funds and will have to charge admission this year if we hope to open at all. When you say your best paintings of the past are in the Gallery I wonder whether that means Stieglitz' place. I have always wanted to have a retrospective Dove exhibition but of course I want your best things from the earlier periods. If you think well of the idea could you send me down a selection of a few good things from your different periods with the date and title on the back. I hope the enclosed check,plus the regular check which has now been sent, will enable you to pay the storage bill and that you can find a safe place to store them for the future, either with us or elsewhere.

I did not paint at all last summer but did considerable writing. A paragraph of my essay on Freshness of Vision in Painting is devoted to your art as an example of a fresh and intense personal quality even in abstract painting, a combination not usually found. It is the distinction of your sensibility which charms me more than your ideas, and your connection with the modern School. Hoping that you and Mrs. Dove have kept well and have painted to your hearts' content,

Sincerely yours
Duncan Phillips
DP. E

I have destroyed everything I painted the one summer several years when I indulged myself with pigments - all except one little flower piece which is good in a very unpretensious way.