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314 West 83rd Street,
New York City.

March 1st 1923.

Mr Kenneth Burke
Editorial Department, The Dial,
152 West 13th Street, N.Y.C.

My dear Mr Burke:

Thank you for your note and the MSS so promptly
returned. Naturally I regret very much that my article should have
been completed at just the particular moment when the "extrinsic
considerations" you mention, were conditioning factors in its non
acceptance for publication.

The latter part of your note, frankly, puzzles me. I recall as
well the two very able articles by Paul Rosenfeld which appeared in
the Dial, but I fail to see how they "overlap somewhat on the ter-
ritory" of mine. The essay on Stieglitz dealt exclusively with the
subject of his photographs and photography. The other essay on
American Painting did have a short critique of the painting of
O'Keeffe, but the treatment was assuredly quite different; as dif-
ferent as that of Santayana and Stefan Zweig in their respective
essays on Dickens, printed in the Dial. Moreover the editors of the
Dial cannot, even though they may not have seen it, be ignorant of
the recent important exhibition of O'Keeffe's work which was on view
at the Anderson Galleries, From Jan 29th to Feb 12th, and which in-
tervened between the writing of Mr Rosenfeld's article and mine.

Particularly am I puzzled by your feeling that territory has
been overlapped when I recall the two above mentioned articles on
Dickens; for evidently to write upon the work of an individual some-
one else has written about, does not in itself constitute overlap-
ing. And further I am astonished when I cannot forget the frequent
publication in the Dial, of the work of Zorach, Hartman, Lachaise

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March 1st 1923.

Mr J.S. Watson Jr.
Editor The Dial,
152 West 13th Street,
New York City.

My dear Mr Watson:

My article on the work of Georgia O'Keeffe was
returned to me this morning by Mr Kenneth Burke of your editorial
department with a note from him. The latter contained some explan-
ations and statements which I do not understand and upon which I
felt constrained to comment. This is just to call to your attent-
ion as editor of the Dial, my letter to Mr Burke.

PRESERVATION PHOTOCOPY: ORIGINAL MATERIAL RESTRICTED

March 21, 1923

Paul Strand, Esq.
314 West 83rd Street
New York City

My dear Mr Strand:

Your brief note to me was, until Monday, lost under
a pile of things on a desk. I assume you want it an-
swered, although you may very well not. Anyway, I take
it you wanted to kill off two birds (Burke and myself)
with one shot and were afraid that I might escape through
carelessness. Certainly, if Burke deserved killing I
did too, for it was at my suggestion that he added the
second paragraph to his letter. The first paragraph was
the usual editorial lamentation about time and space
which means, nine times out of ten, "don't like your
article". I hoped that the addition to the letter might
suggest the reasons why we needed to consider your ar-
ticle only from the point of view of its intrinsic in-
terest and not worry because it was about somebody who
required mention at any cost, or because it represented
a sort of opinion which we had not previously given
space to. Before explaining what we did not like about
your article, I should like to state:

Miss O'Keefe and Mr Stieglitz some time ago very
kindly permitted me to have photographs made of several
of her paintings. We ran the one that seemed the like-
liest for reproduction, with Rosenfeld's article. Theyer
wrote me after having seen it, that he felt that it lost
so much in reproduction that we should not run any more
of them. As this particular one had seemed the likeliest
I rather agreed with him about the others. The things
we reproduce by Zorach, Cummings, Hartmann, and Lachaise,
are at least satisfactory as reproductions. If you know
of any line drawings better than the ones we reproduce
I wish you would let us know about them as they are very
hard to get and we have made it a rule to reproduce four
every month. We have never, I think, had more than a
sentence about Zorach or Hartmann, McBride once mentioned
Cummings' paintings, and one article was devoted to La-
chaise. Both Zorach and Cummings do paintings some of
which we like, but we have never reproduced any of them
because we do not think they reproduce properly. I do
not see how Dickens, a subject presumably of perennial
interest, has anything to do with the matter, though at

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that I grudge him the Zweig essay.

Anyway, all I meant to say was that Miss O'Keefe
has received as much attention as other painters whom
we like equally. Not that she cares, I expect.

Probably you do not feel that your point of view
is at all representative of the two ninety one school
of thought, but they say that to a Chinaman all English-
men look alike. That was why I mentioned Rosenfeld's
article on Stieglitz.

My principal objection to your article was that
you did not say enough about the paintings themselves.
Although one of the editors had seen the new exhibit and
one had not, both agreed that your article had almost
no direct bearing on the paintings. I wish I had your
article here to refer to, but, coarsely, this is how I
remember it. First you said that Miss O'Keefe expressed
the experience of the new women and did not imitate men
in the way that women painters used to do. You said
that anyone looking at her pictures felt immediately
that here was exclusively the expression of a woman's
experience. Well, I want to be shown. No doubt it is
hard to analyze the elements which convey this over-
powering impression, but I think you should have attemp-
ted it. Perhaps you did, but I do not think so and I
read the article twice. You may say that these things
cannot be analyzed or conveyed in words, or that they
ought not to be, but if so, why write about them?
Rosenfeld, by the way, when he says very much as you do,
I insist, that

Next you get us ready to see her colour compared with
Macdonald-Wright's, but you do not really compare them;
you merely contrast what you averred to be their re-
spective approaches to creation and asserted that Miss
O'Keefe's was better.

I admit that we publish a lot of stuff in The Dial
which is not criticism in the true sense, but criticism
is hard to get and press agent stuff often has poetical
or even informative merit. In this case, as I say, the
informative part was not absolutely necessary to us.
Concentration on actual works of art is difficult, re-
quires great ingenuity and perception, but Miss O'Keefe's
paintings deserve it.