Letters of Note: Art

Letters of Note: Art

Letters of Note: Art

Letters of Note: Art

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Overview

A splendid new volume of missives about art, from the author of the bestselling Letters of Note collections.

Vincent Van Gogh curses the stare of the blank canvas. Salvador Dali contemplates mailing a piece of his 'lobster-colored pajamas' to Federico Lorca. Hollis Frampton, to the MoMA, demands that artists be paid. The dean of students at San Francisco Art Institute argues to Alicia McCarthy, in very stern words, that graffit is not art but, rather, a "pain in the ass." In a letter to the editor, Martin Scorsese defends and celebrates Fellini's filmmaking. This collection celebrates extraordinary correspondence about art, from missives on the agony of being overlooked, the ecstacy of producing work that excits, to surprising sources of inspiration and rousing manifestos. These thirty letters show us the many ways that art and life can intersect, and what we talk about when they do.

Includes letters from Carl Jung, Mary Cassatt, Mark Rothko, Oscar Wilde, Frida Kahlo, Mick Jagger, and more.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780143134671
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date: 03/16/2021
Series: Letters of Note , #6
Pages: 144
Sales rank: 1,086,650
Product dimensions: 4.80(w) x 7.00(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

SHAUN USHER is the creator of the enormously popular blogs lettersofnote.com and listsofnote.com and the compiler of the bestselling Letters of Note collections. He spends much of his time hunting for letters and making lists of things to share. He lives in Manchester, England, with his family.

Read an Excerpt

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. That 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

'JUST SLAP SOMETHING

ON IT WHEN YOU

SEE A BLANK

CANVAS STARING

AT YOU . . .'

- Vincent van Gogh

 

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 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

Artemisia Gentileschi to Don Antonio Ruffo

13 November 1649

Born in 1593 to Prudenzia di Ottovania Montoni and her husband, Orazio Gentileschi, an acclaimed Tuscan painter, Artemisia Gentileschi was twelve years old when her mother died; she was then brought up and tutored in painting by her father, whose artistic talents she eventually surpassed. When she was seventeen, Artemisia was raped by her tutor, Agostino Tassi. At the trial, to assess the truthfulness of her testimony, she was tortured with thumbscrews and subsequently believed. Despite this, she went on to become one of the most acclaimed artists of seventeenth-century Europe, a Baroque painter of immense talent whose work is notable for its depictions of strong, heroic women. One of her most famous oil paintings, Judith Slaying Holofernes, shows a biblical scene in which an Assyrian general is beheaded by Old Testament heroine Judith, with help from a maid; another piece, titled Jael and Sisera, shows a different woman poised to hammer a peg into the head of a defeated general. This letter, written to her patron in 1649, shows Artemisia pushing back against unreasonable demands from a potential male client.

 

The Letter

My Most Illustrious Sir,

I have received a letter of October 26th, which I deeply appreciated, particularly noting how my master always concerns himself with favoring me, contrary to my merit. In it, you tell me about that gentleman who wishes to have some paintings by me, that he would like a Galatea and a Judgment of Paris, and that the Galatea should be different from the one that Your Most Illustrious Lordship owns. There was no need for you to urge me to do this, since by the grace of God and the Most Holy Virgin, they [clients] come to a woman with this kind of talent, that is, to vary the subjects in my painting; never has anyone found in my pictures any repetition of invention, not even of one hand.

As for the fact that this gentleman wishes to know the price before the work is done . . . I do it most unwillingly . . . I never quote a price for my works until they are done. However, since Your Most Illustrious Lordship wants me to do this, I will do what you command. Tell this gentleman that I want five hundred ducats for both; he can show them to the whole world and, should he find anyone who does not think the paintings are worth two hundred scudi more, I won't ask him to pay me the agreed price. I assure Your Most Illustrious Lordship that these are paintings with nude figures requiring very expensive female models, which is a big headache. When I find good ones they fleece me, and at other times, one must suffer [their] pettiness with the patience of Job.

As for my doing a drawing and sending it, I have made a solemn vow never to send my drawings because people have cheated me. In particular, just today I found . . . that, having done a drawing of souls in Purgatory for the Bishop of St. Gata, he, in order to spend less, commissioned another painter to do the painting using my work. If I were a man, I can't imagine it would have turned out this way . . .

I must caution Your Most Illustrious Lordship that when I ask a price, I don't follow the custom in Naples, where they ask thirty and then give it for four. I am Roman, and therefore I shall act always in the Roman manner.

From Naples, the 13th of November, 1649.

The most humble servant of Your Most Illustrious Lordship,

Artemisia Gentileschi

'IF I WERE A MAN, I CAN'T IMAGINE IT WOULD HAVE TURNED OUT THIS WAY . . .'

- Artemisia Gentileschi

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