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Mary LaskerMary Lasker
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of the atomic bomb. They date the world really. It's the kind of thing that whether he knows it or not, could only have happened with the impact of the explosiveness of the bomb. That's really what they symbolize to people that look at them sensitively.

Well, he was a man who was extremely predise. We didn't get much out of him at that visit, but about a year ago I took Mrs. Stephen Smith, President Kennedy's sister, to see him with Mr. Lem Billings. Mrs. Smith and I started to have a talk with him and we said, “When did you start painting?”

He said, “I was in the WPA painting project. You know, we painted really hundreds of paintings for this.”

I said, “What's happened to them?”

He said, “Well, you know, all the WPA paintings, including mine, were stored in a great storage warehouse and I've heard that a few years ago the government got tired of storing these paintings and they sold them for insulation to some big plumber who has used them to wrap pipes.”

Q:

Without any effort to cull through them?

Lasker:

Evidently not--there were so many thousands. He said, “The truth is that the paintings I did then weren't so terribly good,” and I think that's true, because I think he has developed





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