Danto

Columbia University in the City of New York                      
New York, N.Y. 10027
Department of Philosophy                                                                 Philosophy Hall
                                                                                    31 July, 1986
 
Dear Patrick,
 
Thanks for the note on the memoir of Rivera. I am always glad to get some communication from my own era in Detroit, so much a fog to me in retrospect. We came from different sides of the track—my father was a dentist, and we lived a supremely middle-class life. I went to Wayne after the war, and I thought it, I think it still, a great school. I heard the black bands at the Colonial Theater, at Woodward and Sibley, next to my father’s office. I have not been back to Detroit for twenty years, I think, my parents having moved away. Someone invited me to lecture at the Detroit Institute of Arts, but I could not face a Detroit audience somehow. But I would like again to see the paintings I grew up with, not only those of Diego but the German Expressionists whose work I loved.
 
Good luck,
 
Arthur Danto