Out Of The Blue

Yesterday out of the blue I got a letter from the Whitney Museum Of American Art.

Dear Ira Joel Haber:
We are honored to have your work in our collection. As a token of our esteem and appreciation, we have enclosed an artist lifetime pass to the Whitney Museum Of American Art, for your personal use.

A complete surprise to me, and I have no idea what the work is that they have acquired. I suppose someone has donated it. The Whitney has not been very supportive of my art since the early-mid 1970's when I was in two Whitney Annuals. This was before they switched over to their Bi- annuals. One year the annual would be for painting, and the next year it would be sculpture. The first annual I was in was in 1970 when I was 23, the youngest artist at that time to ever be in one of their shows. The illustrations are the cover of the catalog from the 1970 annual and the piece that I showed. It was bought by the late German art collector Peter Ludwig and it resides in his museum in Aachen.