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good. They were very, very good. I have a picture in my office that is one of them. I selected it for my office and have had it ever since. We had brought these pictures to Washington at a great expense. They belonged to the government. They'd been painted and paid for by the government. The problem was what to do with them. We decided that any picture could be used to ornament the walls, or to be hung in government offices. Of course, a record has to be kept of where it is. The government doesn't surrender possession of it.
I was very much interested in this. The Department of Labor had not been selected as a building whose walls could be painted. It was not suitable for it. The main corridor is very low-ceilinged and it Wouldn't have been suitable. I've forgotten whether we'd moved or not, but anyway it wasn't suitable. We selected hundreds of these pictures to hang on our walls. I appointed Mary La Dame, who was executive assistant to me and a woman of extraordinarily good and fine taste, very well versed in modern art, with a real understanding of it, Miss Jay, and one of the men who didn't know much about art but was very responsive to it - I forget who it was - to make the selections. They selected the cream of the crop. There's no question about it.
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