Lieber Harry: Lend me your ears!
 understand from your letter to Sweeney that his function is concerned with the selection and direct presentation of the contents of the museum and does not extend to the violation of the architecture of the building; he was to have no right to qualify or change the building.
This type of structure has no inside independent of the outside structure as one flows into and is of the other. Integrity is gone if separated and you have the conventional building of yesteryear. The features of this new structure are seen coming inside as well as the inside features going outside. This integration yields a nobility of quality and the strength of simple city—a truth of which our culture has yet seen little and James has seen none. His work has had no architectural relationship whatsoever. Whitewash has been his vade mecum. He has whitewashed old buildings as he whitewashed his own home and always with this white shroud for paintings flooded it with artificial light. A cheap means to get effects. Take a gold frame off a painting, put a white mat on it and you will see what I mean. To thus tear the inside from the outside of the memorial would not only thus cheapen the character of the thing but actually destroy the virtue and beauty of the building. The various massive forms created inside as the architecture would be out of scale if exaggerated by white-washing them all together white regardless and you would have an effect something like you can see in the toilets of the Racquet Club should you happen to look in.
Now here is the situation now. The building we have built was formed on the idea that an architectural environment that made the picture an individual thing in itself—emphasized like a signet in a ring, not placed as though painted on a flat wall—would give relief and emphasis to painting never known before. Take that away and you have murdered the soul of the building to promote the cliché Sweeney’s whitewash would be and literally destroy the nobility of its conception and inception. This I know you do not intend to do and so understood it from your letter. Not so Sweeney. He still wants to whitewash the whole building.
Ivory white of the same cast as the exterior should be used to give the architecture due coherence and dignity—thereby adding to the life of the picture by way of atmosphere—a quality picture galleries have never yet contributed.
For this I left the interior walls circular and devised a way of showing the picture as charming in itself—an independent object even when walls were behind it. I will represent this to your satisfaction when the light is overhead and the building closed in. I am sure you would consent to nothing otherwise.
Affection,
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