I discover that at the level of ideas we have much in common. He (Cornell) is a Feuerbachian, ‘humanist’ socialist, who clearly believes in the significance of a utopian, affective vision of aesthetic practice… The problematic he has set himself as a painter is that between percepts (or direct observation) and the construction of a totalized image of the world…The nearest parallel I know to Cornell is in fact Kitaj: indeed, Kitaj’s finest picture, If not, not, seems to me simply a more achieved version of what Cornell is attempting – in part because it has more ‘abstract’ space in it…I would say that something like Cornell’s conception of ‘authority’ is the necessary attitude towards Greenberg now: one has to go beyond the struggle against the father.