Art (Letters of Note, 6) - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

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.

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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,...