Letters of Note Read online

  Letters of Note was born in 2009 with the launch of lettersofnote.com, a website celebrating old-fashioned correspondence that has since been visited over 100 million times. The first Letters of Note volume was published in October 2013, followed later that year by the first Letters Live, an event at which world-class performers delivered remarkable letters to a live audience.

  Since then, these two siblings have grown side by side, with Letters of Note becoming an international phenomenon, and Letters Live shows being staged at iconic venues around the world, from London’s Royal Albert Hall to the theatre at the Ace Hotel in Los Angeles.

  You can find out more at lettersofnote.com and letterslive.com. And now you can also listen to the audio editions of the new series of Letters of Note, read by an extraordinary cast drawn from the wealth of talent that regularly takes part in the acclaimed Letters Live shows.

  First published in Great Britain in 2020 by Canongate Books Ltd,

  14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE

  canongate.co.uk

  This digital edition first published in 2020 by Canongate Books

  Copyright © Shaun Usher, 2020

  The right of Shaun Usher to be identified as the

  author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance

  with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  For permission credits, please see here

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available on

  request from the British Library

  ISBN 978 1 83885 146 0

  eISBN 978 1 83885 147 7

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  01 THE CANVAS HAS AN IDIOTIC STARE

  Vincent van Gogh to Theo van Gogh

  02 FUCK THE ART WORLD PRESSURES

  Lucy R. Lippard to a Young Woman Artist

  03 HOW BEAUTIFUL!

  Salvador Dalí to Federico García Lorca

  04 I AM NOT GOING TO STAND FOR IT

  Oscar Howe to Jeanne Snodgrass King

  05 IF I WERE A MAN, I CANNOT IMAGINE IT WOULD TURN OUT THIS WAY

  Artemisia Gentileschi to Don Antonio Ruffo

  06 WHY CAN’T WE PAINT LIKE THE ROMANTICS ANY MORE?

  Carl Jung to Arnold Kübler

  07 IT IS ALL FOR LOVE AND HONOR

  Hollis Frampton to MoMA

  08 ART IS A GREAT INTELLECTUAL STIMULUS

  Mary Cassatt to Theodate Pope

  09 A LANDSCAPE PAINTER’S DAY IS DELIGHTFUL

  Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot to an unknown recipient

  10 AN ARTIST MUST POSESS NATURE

  Henri Matisse to Henry Clifford

  11 LET ME HAVE ARTISTS FOR FRIENDS

  J.D. Fergusson to Margaret Morris

  12 AN OBJECT OF PECULIAR ODIUM

  Harriet Hosmer to Art-Journal

  13 GRAFFITI LOOKS LIKE SHIT

  Michael Grady to Alicia McCarthy

  14 POP ART IS:

  Richard Hamilton to Peter and Alison Smithson

  15 DIVERSITY GUARANTEES OUR CULTURAL SURVIVAL

  Martin Scorsese to the New York Times

  16 IS THIS TOO MUCH TO ASK OF WHITE AMERICAN CHIVALRY?

  Augusta Savage to the New York World newspaper

  17 ART IS AN ADVENTURE INTO AN UNKNOWN WORLD

  Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb to the New York Times

  18 THE MOST SPECTACULAR MONOCHROME REALIZATIONS

  Yves Klein to the President of the International Conference for the Detection of Nuclear Explosions

  19 IF IT IS NOT THOUGHT OUT, IT IS NOTHING

  Oscar Wilde to Marie Prescott

  20 DEAR EDITOR

  Adrian Piper to various editors

  21 PAINTING AND SCULPTURE ARE ONE AND THE SAME THING

  Michelangelo to Benedetto Varchi

  22 THE POINT OF BEING AN ARTIST IS THAT YOU MAY LIVE

  Sherwood Anderson to John Anderson

  23 WHAT LIMBS THAT MAN COULD DRAW!

  Paula Modersohn-Becker to Carl Woldemar Becker

  24 SPECIFICALLY, A DUEL

  Mark Pauline to Dennis Oppenheim

  25 I AM NO LONGER AN ARTIST

  Paul Nash to Margaret Nash

  26 AN EXPLOSIVE SLAB OF CHOCOLATE

  Lord Victor Rothschild to Laurence Fish

  27 TO HELL WITH THE EXHIBITION

  Frida Kahlo to Nickolas Muray

  28 I AM NOT MAURITS TO HIM

  Mick Jagger and M. C. Escher

  29 I AM APPALLED BY MOCA’S DECISION

  Hans Haacke to Richard Koshalek

  30 DO

  Sol LeWitt to Eva Hesse

  PERMISSION CREDITS

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  For Sarah

  A letter is a time bomb, a message in a bottle, a spell, a cry for help, a story, an expression of concern, a ladle of love, a way to connect through words. This simple and brilliantly democratic art form remains a potent means of communication and, regardless of whatever technological revolution we are in the middle of, the letter lives and, like literature, it always will.

  INTRODUCTION

  Think of this book as a gallery.

  Better still, a private gallery that fits in your pocket, with no rules to speak of. Yes, you can touch the exhibits. Of course you can take photos with the flash on. And no, you are not required to speak quietly. On the walls of this gallery can be found thirty letters of note, all of which in some way shine a light on various moments in the history of art and illuminate them for your enjoyment; most, but not all, written through the ages by artists themselves – artists who momentarily put down their pencils, their paintbrushes, their chisels, and instead put pen to paper to create the windows into the art world through which you are soon to look.

  Like art so often can, some of these letters act as portals to a particular time and place. Just as Constable’s The Hay Wain immediately transports you to the River Stour beneath a cluster of clouds one calm day in the nineteenth century, so too shall war artist Paul Nash’s bleakly harrowing missive to his wife drop you onto the hellish field of battle during World War I; and just as the broad, expressive brushstrokes of Rembrandt’s Self-Portrait somehow reveal so much about someone you have never met, so too will Italian painter Artemisia Gentileschi’s defiant letter to her patron, written at a time when she was simply not meant to succeed, paint a powerful picture of its determined author.

  Additionally, just hearing the voice of an artist through their letters can be an odd and thrilling experience. I can vividly remember the time I was introduced to the correspondence of Salvador Dalí, whose otherworldly paintings defy description – his fantastical landscapes littered with scenes that play tricks on the mind, causing the viewing experience to become almost hallucinatory. Not for one moment did I imagine that his letters would provoke a similar reaction in me. Yet here was I, letter in hand, baffled and amused in equal measure by his seemingly random talk of ‘stray breasts’ and ‘nests of anaesthetized wasps’, but delighted to hear his voice loud and clear in a different medium – strangely comforted to feel his art pushing through the page.

  Letters offer an artist a different creative outlet, and a means by which to discuss the final product they thrust out into the world. To be able to read about their process, their fears, their excitement, is an opportunity too valuable to ignore.

  Having spent a considerable portion of my adult life obsessively sifting through the correspondence of others in search of the latest masterpiece, I am firmly of the belief that some letters can and should themselves be considered works of art – invaluable, often culturally significant objects to be enjoyed and appreciated by as wide an audience as possible. Which is why, hanging on the wall to my left as I write, is a framed copy of Sol LeWitt’s incomparable letter of encouragement to fellow artist Eva Hesse, a piece of correspondence so impactful, thought-provoking and creatively stimulating that it also happens to close the book you now hold, each of its 800 words working as hard as the individual brushstrokes of any oil painting.

  Perhaps, when you leave this tiny gallery, you may be inclined to fill a space on a wall of your own.

  Shaun Usher

  2020

  LETTER 01

  THE CANVAS HAS AN IDIOTIC STARE

  Vincent van Gogh to Theo van Gogh

  2 October 1884

  It wasn’t until his thirties that Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh found his calling as an artist. Born in Zundert in 1853, his early years saw him flit from job to job, his only real focus being a deepening dedication to religion. In 1879 he took a missionary post in Belgium where he lived in poverty and squalor. His family, who had supported him for years, were losing patience; at one point his father even tried to have him committed to an asylum. In 1881, with financial backing from his younger brother, Theo, Vincent began to paint, and for the remainder of his life spent much of his time creating the work for which he is now known. In 1884, aged thirty-one, he wrote this letter to his brother. It would be six years later, in Auvers-sur-Oise, that Vincent, deeply depressed, would take his own life.

  THE LETTER

  My dear Theo,

  Thanks for your letter, thanks for the enclosure.

  Now listen here.

  . . .

  I tell you, if one wants to be active, one mustn’t be afraid to do something wrong sometimes, not afraid to lapse into some mistakes. To be good – many people think that they’ll achieve it by doing no harm – and that’s a lie, and you said yourself in the past that it was a lie. T
hat leads to stagnation, to mediocrity. Just slap something on it when you see a blank canvas staring at you with a sort of imbecility.

  You don’t know how paralyzing it is, that stare from a blank canvas that says to the painter you can’t do anything. The canvas has an idiotic stare, and mesmerizes some painters so that they turn into idiots themselves. Many painters are afraid of the blank canvas, but the blank canvas IS AFRAID of the truly passionate painter who dares – and who has once broken the spell of ‘you can’t’.

  Life itself likewise always turns towards one an infinitely meaningless, discouraging, dispiriting blank side on which there is nothing, any more than on a blank canvas.

  But however meaningless and vain, however dead life appears, the man of faith, of energy, of warmth, and who knows something, doesn’t let himself be fobbed off like that. He steps in and does something, and hangs on to that, in short, breaks, ‘violates’ – they say.

  Let them talk, those cold theologians

  ‘SUCCESS IS SCIENCE; IF YOU HAVE THE CONDITIONS, YOU GET THE RESULT.’

  – Oscar Wilde

  LETTER 02

  FUCK THE ART WORLD PRESSURES

  Lucy R. Lippard to a Young Woman Artist

  1974

  In 1974 Miriam Schapiro, co-founder and director of the Feminist Art Program at the California Institute of the Arts, encouraged seventeen of her female students to write to women in the art world with a request: to reply with a letter of advice to a ‘Young Woman Artist’. These invaluable pieces of correspondence were then to be compiled in Anonymous Was a Woman, a book to be published as part of that year’s Women’s Art Festival. Before long, letters arrived from seventy-one of the women, including Lucy R. Lippard, a highly respected and influential writer, curator, art critic and feminist whose achievements are rivalled by very few.

  THE LETTER

  March 6, 1974

  138 Prince St.

  NYC 10012

  To a Young Woman Artist,

  I’m sorry this has to be so short, because I have a lot I’d like to talk about with you, but try to read between the lines. I hope you’re angry but get it over with fast and use it while you’ve got it. I hope you don’t stop being angry now and then until things are better for all women, not just artists; I hope you’re working from yourself and know how to fuck the art world pressures when you get out there; and I hope you’re working for everybody else too; I hope you’ll be the one to figure out a way to keep art from being used the wrong way and for the wrong things in this society; I hope you make your art accessible to more people, to all women and to everybody; I hope you think about that now and aren’t waiting till you make it, because that’s likely to be too late. I hope you remember that being a feminist carries with it a real responsibility to be a human. I hope and I hope and I hope . . .

  love,

  Lucy Lippard

  LETTER 03

  HOW BEAUTIFUL!

  Salvador Dalí to Federico García Lorca

  December 1927

  Born in Catalonia in 1904, Salvador Dalí’s artworks are known the world over thanks in no small part to their surreal, dreamlike nature. His iconic paintings are filled with optical illusions, distorted scenery, melting objects and sexual imagery. This, coupled with a flamboyant persona that itself was somewhat a work of art, have cemented his place in the annals of art history. At college in 1923, Dalí met and grew close to the poet Federico García Lorca, and for some time they wrote to each other on a whole host of subjects. It is no surprise to learn that Dalí’s letters are like nothing written before.

  THE LETTER

  Federico,

  I’m working on paintings that make me die for joy, I’m creating in a purely natural way, without the slightest artistic worry, and finding things that move me deeply, and trying to paint honestly, that is, exactly. In that sense I’m beginning to completely understand the senses. Sometimes I think I’ve recovered – with unsuspected intensity – the “illusions” and joys of my childhood. I feel a great love for grass, thorns in the palm of the hand, ears red against the sun, and the little feathers of bottles. Not only does all this delight me, but also the grapevines and the donkeys that crowd the sky.

  Just now I’m painting a very beautiful smiling woman, bristling with feathers of every color, held up by a small marble dice that is on fire. The marble dice is supported, in turn, on a quiet, humble little plume of smoke. In the sky are donkeys with parrot heads, grass and sand from the beach, all about to explode, all clean, incredibly objective, and the scene is awash in an indescribable blue, the green, the red and yellow of a parrot, an edible white, the metallic white of a stray breast (you know that there are also “stray breasts,” just the opposite of the flying breast, for the stray one is at peace without knowing what to do and is so defenseless it moves me).

  Stray breasts (how beautiful!)

  After this, I’m thinking of painting a nightingale. It will be titled NIGHTINGALE and it will be a feathered vegetal donkey in the woodsy canopy of a sky bristling with nettles, etc. etc.

  Helle, dear sir! Yessirree, you must be rich. If I were with you I would be your whore to cajole you and steal peseta notes to dip in donkey piss . . .

  I’m tempted to send you a piece of my lobster-colored pajamas, or better yet,

  “lobster-dream-colored” pajamas, to see if you are moved, in your opulence, to send me money [. . .] Anyway, just think, with a little money, with 500 pesetas, we could bring out an issue of the ANTI-ARTISTIC magazine and shit on everyone and everything from the Orfeo Catalán to Juan Ramón.

  (Give Margarita a kiss on the tip of her nose, the whole thing is like a nest of anaesthetized wasps.)

  Farewell, Sir, a kiss on

  the palmtree from your

  ROTTING DONKEY

  LETTER 04

  I AM NOT GOING TO STAND FOR IT

  Oscar Howe to Jeanne Snodgrass

  18 April 1958

  Oscar Howe was born in 1915 on the Crow Creek Sioux Reservation in South Dakota, a direct descendant of Yankton Sioux Chiefs. As a child he attended Pierre Indian School, then studied art under Dorothy Dunn at Santa Fe Indian School, and eventually obtained a Master of Fine Arts at the University of Oklahoma, all while building a solid reputation for his modernist depictions of Native American life. In 1958 he submitted one of his abstract works, Umine Wacipe: War and Peace Dance, for an annual exhibition of Indian art at the Philbrook Art Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma, only for it to be rejected for supposedly not being a ‘traditional Indian painting’. Howe responded with a letter that eventually led to change and acceptance both at the institution and in the wider art community; it was written to Jeanne Snodgrass King, the museum’s curator of Native American art.

  THE LETTER

  Dear Mrs Snodgrass,

  Who ever said that my paintings are not in the traditional Indian style has poor knowledge of Indian art indeed. There is much more to Indian Art than pretty, stylized pictures. There was also power and strength and individualism (emotional and intellectual insight) in the old Indian paintings. Every bit in my painting is a true, studied fact of Indian paintings. Are we to be held back forever with one phase of Indian painting, with no right for individualism, dictated to as the Indian has always been, put on reservations and treated like a child, and only the White Man knows what is best for him? Now, even in Art, “You little child do what we think is best for you, nothing different.” Well, I am not going to stand for it. Indian Art can compete with any Art in the world, but not as a suppressed Art. I see so much of the mismanagement and treatment of my people. It makes me cry inside to look at these poor people. My father died there about three years ago in a little shack, my two brothers still living there in shacks, never enough to eat, never enough clothing, treated as second class citizens. This is one of the reasons I have tried to keep the fine ways and culture of my forefathers alive. But one could easily turn to become a social protest painter. I only hope the Art World will not be one more contributor to holding us in chains.

  Oscar Howe

  LETTER 05

  IF I WERE A MAN, I CANNOT IMAGINE IT WOULD TURN OUT THIS WAY