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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
                                         June 15, 1934
Mr. Arthur G. Dove,
    Geneva,
         New York.

Dear Mr. Dove:

     I have never written to you since seeing your exhibition and before leaving for the summer I want to tell you how much I have enjoyed your new work. At first I may have felt that the standard was not as high as last year but as time goes on I am more and more delighted with at least two of the new canvases. The Barn next Door has a superb swing of rhythm and is a perfect thing both in form and color. I have framed it with an inside of white and a carved frame of dulled gold with simple ornaments at the corners. Thus attired it has the richness of an Old Master and, in fact, Titian comes to my mind as he has often done when I looked at your Red Barge, Reflections. The other picture I like best is the very difficult and to me quite tragic abstraction curiously entitled Tree Trunks. I see petrified trees and I take it as a hint of the tragedy of the soil. There is death in the picture but life goes on in the suggestion of wind and gleams of light. I can only afford six hundred dollars in addition to the three hundred we owed you on the balance for Red Barge Reflections, but I will send an additional hundred for the small picture entitled Train, bringing the year's subsidy to one thousand dollars. And I will take the Barn Next Door, the Abstraction, and either The Hound or Sowing Wheat. Could I keep them both through the summer and decided in the fall? I would like to keep the water color for Barn Next Door at least for a while and also Over Lake Geneva. It may be that Mr. Watkins will be able to sell these pictures next year at the Studio House in case I feel I should not purchase them.

     I am returning to Mr. Stieglitz at American Place via George F. Of, two oils, namely Distraction and Approaching Snow Storm, also four water colors, namely Snow, Hound, Horses, and Sowing Wheat. As I wrote to Mr. Stieglitz, I do want not only to keep in touch with your new work but to see the work of your earlier periods. Next year you and Mrs. Dove must come down here and make us a visit and perhaps you can bring examples of your earlier work which you think we will like. That retrospective Dove exhibition in our Gallery is a plan which I have had to postpone but have by no means abandoned. Do let me know how you are getting on and what you are planing to do in the coming months. Your art certainly rings a bell with me. There is no man in America with a finer mastery of paint and a more lyrical language of abstract form and color. Greetings and best wishes,
                                   Sincerely yours
                                         Duncan Phillips
DP.E
P.S My summer address is Ebensburg, Pennsylvania