Holbrook to Marshall

The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis has a wonderful blog post up [here] detailing J. LeRoy Davidson and his curatorial role in the Advancing American Art program at the State Department. Davidson and the 1946 exhibition are the subject of an exhibition--Art Interrupted: Advancing American Art and the Politics of Cultural Diplomacy--now open at the Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art at Auburn. The show will be at the Georgia Museum of Art next autumn...

The Walker's blog post has a letter written by Daniel Defenbacher, the Walker’s director, to Secretary of State George Marshall protesting the end of the State Department's program overseen by Davidson.

In the archives in the C.L. Morehead Jr. Center for the Study of American Art at the Georgia Museum of Art, we have a letter dated 12 May 1947 from our first director/curator, Alfred Holbrook, to Secretary Marshall as well:

In it, Holbrook writes: "It would seem that the criticisms I have read, in the newspaper furor that has been created, results from an art taste that is 25 years behind the times."