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[[letterhead]]
ARTHUR C. DANTO
420 RIVERSIDE DRIVE
NEW YORK, NEW YORK 10025
[[/letterhead]]

March 10, 1985

Dear Robert Motherwell,

It is quite striking that you should have mentioned Kierkegaard in ^[[your]] generous post-script, for in fact it was precisely a title of his that I held in my mind when I was thinking through your exhibition. The book was [[underlined]] Repetitions [[/underlined]], the title of which is better than the book itself, though I always return to it in the hope that I have missed something, since the very concept of rep^[[^et]]itions seems so profound to me, and he, of all people, should be able to say why. In any case the great thing about an exhibition like that, covering an entire life's work - well, a substantial part of an entire life - is that it brings out features one cannot see in looking at individual paintings or even the ordinary shows one visits to keep up with an artist one admires. And for me it was the periodicities, the rep^[[^et]]itions, that make an impact that the individual works, powerful as they were, could not: or a different kind of impact. It was plain that you were not "repeating yourself," it was plain that the corpus was not "repetitive" in the dispraising sense of these terms. And I felt I wanted an explanation of that. The idea of total lives is much in the philosophical wind these days, in moral treatises for example, though of course it is as old as the myth of Er in the R^[[^e]]public. Anyway, there was a marvelous sense of living through a lifetime from without at the Guggenheim, and I felt I somehow knew you well and even deeply by time I was through. And when work is as expressive as yours, the context of a life cannot be ignored. But what a powerful, comforting confirmation your letter gave!

Abut Plato's cave, this is what I meant. The diagram you refer to is fine in marking out the segments in such as way as to grasp the points of the intended metaphor, but it, like all diagrams, is external. To recover the experience of the cave itself, from such helps would be like trying to imagine the quality of life on earth from some map or other. I had the sense that your's was, so to speak, an expression of [[underlined]] being in [[/underlined]] a cave, hence grey and dark. But the charm of Plato's religious teaching is that the experience of the cave is our very experience of the world we live in, full of light and flowers and butterflys and flesh. So we do not experience it [[underlined]] as [[/underlined]] a cave, and accordingly the claim that it is one, that it is all shadow, is simply unintelligible, at least to the cave dwellers. It must be something like the message the great thinkers of Vedanta give that the world itself is an illusion, when in truth it does not look that way, and cannot. There are some illusions we live through,