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5 East 57th Street
New York 22, N.Y.
October 9th, 1945

Dear Francois:

I sent you on October 6th by regular mail a catalogue of the coming sale of the collection of Mrs. Van Wie Willys which I hope you will receive. Later on I will send you all the prices I am able to gather to enable you to see the difference in prices obtained at that sale. I expect that they will be much lower than similar works of art would fetch in Paris.

I am afraid that it is still impossible for you to give us an order to purchase for you in case something should interest you. Until now we have not seen the works of art which are not on exhibition but I would say for the future that in the event anything would have interested you, we would naturally have looked at it very carefully before buying it. This is the first interesting sale for which we received catalogues this year.

Thank you for the Gruber photographs. Germain and I discussed the matter lengthily. You are quite right, Gruber seems to have improved a lot, but from the photographs we do not get the "shock" that would raise our enthusiasm to the point of allowing us to ask you to send us Gruber's production. But do not tell him "no" definitely because we would like to have a chance to see his paintings and maybe when we see the colors which seem to be deep, we might reverse our opinion. During our conversation, Germain had a very good approach to what we are looking for. He would like to show here an artist who would have more originality, and be more of a leader who would create a great interest. Of course, the idea would be a new Cezanne, Seurat or Van Gogh, uptodate, in the style of our century or creating a new style. I would add personally that Gruber's colors are still very tragic -- dark green, dark red, dark brown. Am I right? One of Cezanne's phrases struck me very much: never use "des terres". Anyhow, Gruber is very powerful and to a certain extent, and this is very curious, from his photographs he has the same qualities and defects of the exceptionally good American artists.

The address of Mrs. R. von Hirsch is 55 Engelgasse, Basel, Switzerland.