To the Editors:
Only just now did I see Hilton Kramer’s piece on Fairfield Porter in your May number. Mr. Kramer quotes a paragraph from an interview the artist gave Paul Cummings that was published in the Archives of American Art. Every reference made to me in that interview contains errors of fact or is wholly fictitious in substance.

Porter did not introduce me to de Kooning, whom I’d met several years before I ever set eyes on Porter. We were never in de Kooning’s presence together. Fairfield and I did see one another often, but far from “regularly,” in 1942, not at all before that, and hardly at all afterwards. We seldom argued, we seldom disagreed. Once, in the summer of 1942, we painted together.

This trivia to show Fairfield’s relation to the truth. What isn’t trivial, at least for me, is his having me tell de Kooning (no acolyte of the truth either), “You can’t paint figuratively today.” That’s dreamt up. You don’t talk that way to art or to artists.

Porter was a bit “touched”; I have to come out and say that. There was something wrong with him, and not only in relation to the truth. I admired his art, but by the time he started showing I’d acquired a distaste for his person that kept me from writing or even talking about anything that had to do with him. (There was one other instance in which I let my reaction to