To the Editors:
Regarding Dan Hofstadter’s article, “The Figurative Fifties,” in your May 1989 issue:
The father of the artist Jan Müller was not a Communist. In Germany, he was a socialist.
The father did not arrive in the United States in the Thirties. He arrived in 1941.
Jan Müller and one of his sisters arrived in the United States approximately six months later. He was nineteen years old.
Jan Müller was one month into his thirty-fifth year when he died. He did not die of rheumatic fever. He died in January, 1958, due to a malfunction of a plastic valve in his heart.
The artist Bob Thompson never met Jan Müller. Bob Thompson arrived “on the scene” in Provincetown six months after Jan Muller’s death. He became very familiar with Jan Muller’s work via his widow.
Bob Thompson died of drug-related causes.
As your magazine may possibly be used as a reference for young future art historians, it would be appreciated if these oblique remarks were made more accurate.
Dody Müller
New York, NY
Dan Hofstadter replies:
Dody Miiller was the wife of the painter Jan Müller and wrote an authoritative account of his life for the catalogue of his 1962 retrospective at the Guggenheim museum. The errors she has discovered in my review of the “Figurative Fifties” exhibition were the result of a garbled transmission of facts and have no polemical import; certainly none of the circumstances