Robert Strong Woodward
Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts
undated, probably around 19 or 20 April 1938
My dear Royal Cortissoz, greetings to you from Rob Woodward, with genuine hopes you have been well this winter. I begin this letter with a quoatation words of your own, printed in your review of John Whorf's exhibition, a week ago Sunday, April 10th.
"Today, coming forward again at the Milch Gallery, he (John Whorf) achieves even more decisively effects pointing to individualized ability, that gift is for the unhesitating and exact registration of the thing seen. There is nothing in the smallest degree photographic about his art, it is simply that he sees the truth and sets it down in unmistakable terms. Moreover, he sees the truth beautifully, so that he can take a prosaic subject, like the snow beleaguered house in Winter Morning and make a charming picture out of it.."
These are nicely written, chosen, words but I wonder if you realized (this is a rhetorical question for I well know you did not) that you were lauding Whorf, for copying in an underhanded, dastardly way, and passing it off as his composition and conception of truth my masterly painting of the truth, Country Piazza! Mr. Arkell now owns my canvas, bought by him two years ago for his Canajoharie Gallery.
A week ago Sunday, as I turned to the Artpage in the Herald Tribune (as I always do, to read your reviews) my eyes instantly fell to the illustration at the bottom of the sheet, with the first seconds thought of wonder, as to where Mr. Arkell could now be sending my Country Piazza canvas, that it should be illustrated only with the second seconds realization, that it was titled Winter Morning and stated below the picture that it was painted by John Whorf! It was a blow between the eyes! I was faint and dizzy and bewildered all day and it still seems to me like an eerie, uncanny thrust of fate, not to be believed. Yes, Whorf has tried to be clever with certain details, certain changes, so that if brought to bay he could say the picture, the composition, the conception is mine; he has changed the filigree gingerbread post capitals the most subtle touch in my canvas to Doric columns in his lefthand porch; he has left the figure off the settee; he has placed a chair and shadow where I had drying milk pails, he has shortened the woodshed ell with a glimpse of tree beyond it, and changed its doorway a bit; he has put a tile on the ell chimney, and some blinds on the upstairs windows, yes, yet despite all this he has not covered up one fraction to a perceptive, intelligent man, that he has copied and faked my masterly picture and thrown it before the world as his. The foreground alone is a copy almost line for line all so New England in its subtle touches the straggling wire fence at the left remaining from last years flower bed also at the right, the same group of stakes, the bush by the corner porch post the slanting cleared path running out of the foreground copied almost line for line. Realizing that it pulled the eye out a little bit too strongly to the right, I put in some cross shadows on the snow to hold the eye into the picture at that point; Whorf of course realizing this constructive point has done just the same somewhat different in arrangement the man has even put in two hen turkies and one gobbler, where mine strut. Look at the lefthand piazza chair back identical; look at the sagging slant of the righthand porch post against the dark of wood shed identical; look at the bit of background hill top to the right, where I put in a pine top to break the monotony of line identical. But of all things that hurt me most is the snow on the left piazza roof; almost identically in wave and proportion, Whorf has copied it even to the subtle touch which was mine of the wavey bottom line ~~~~~~ showing how the corrugated metal roof has so shaped the melting roof-drift.
--------- It all sickens as well as frightens me! I feel as if a strange man had been intimate with my wife! What to do? I would like to drag Whorf through the courts but the subtleties of the affair placed before the average jury is unthinkable. Besides I have no money to fight. I would like to come to New York, borrow the Country Piazza from Mr. Arkell, take it to the Milch Gallery place it under Whorf's copy, and ask the Milch people to realize what their brilliant showman is doing to gain his vaunted originality. But again I have no money for the fight.
My paintings have something beyond merely the representation of factual truth. All the tragedy, humor, and struggle of New England farm life are found in this painting of mine, Country Piazza. Critics have been slow to realize what I have to give, strangely slow but it will live down through later generations. Yes, this sounds to you like the twaddle of every man of every artist but I KNOW we shall see.
Where John Whorf did his copying I do not know. This canvas has been one of the most travelled pictures I ever had, until it came to rest with Mr. Arkell and even he has sent it to various important showings about the country, from Canajoharie. Aside from local exhibitions about the state, I showed it first six years ago at Manchester. It was invited to the Corcoran and to Pennsylvania; Harshe invited it to the Chicago World Fairs famous Exhibition. It went on tour of the Canadian museums of the Middle West museums and to Dallas, etc. It has been illustrated in nearly all the leading art magazines of the country and in many of the leading newspapers until it has nearly become the public's property but still, as you know, it is mine and what am I to do when another painter copies it and says it is his and receives praise for his expression of truth?
I wonder just what would be your advice?
In deep concern
Robert Strong Woodward