Sirs:
Barbara Rose (in Artforum, November 1966) learned from the Whitney Museum’s opening show “how American realism deteriorated from its apogee in Eakins to its nadir in the thirties and forties,” and left the matter at that. Unfortunately, so did the Whitney; there is not one single work in the show representing the renewed vitality of representational painting in New York in the fifties and sixties. The advanced (non-academic, post-abstract, Pop-less) work of artists like Lennart Anderson, Leland Bell, Nell Blaine, John Button, Lois Dodd, Joseph Fiore, Jane Freilicher, Paul Georges, Alex Katz, Robert de Niro, Philip Pearlstein, Fairfield Porter, Herman Rose, Jane Wilson, is wholly ignored in a “survey” which pretends to be comprehensive. Because the Whitney gives the false impression that the books are closed on this kind of painting, as well as for the reasons she herself gives, Miss Rose is quite right to judge the “hip new uptown” Whitney worse than the “schmaltzy old downtown” one.
But as for Miss Rose, by not correcting this impression in her review, is she not a passive accomplice of the change she describes and apparently laments in saying that it is “no longer the case” that taste is “formed by artists and critics?” Is she not allowing the Whitney to form, or at least represent, her taste when she ignores its omission of good recent figurative painting? Whether or not Miss Rose is personally interested in the above painters, she is surely aware of them, and should be a more conscientious historian than to permit their absence from the Whitney show to pass in silence.
—Scott Burton
New York
Sirs:
The beautiful Magritte illustrated in your Special Issue on Surrealism (page 68) is not mine. It belongs to the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It was given by my parents, which might explain the mistake.
—George de Menil
Cambridge, Mass.
