The Thyssen exhibits 34 letters from great artists of the last two centuries along with some of their works. Géricault, Van Gogh, Frida Kahlo or Lucien Freud sign the manuscripts in the Anne-Marie Springer collection, which houses more than 2000 originals
“Don’t be sad – paint and live. I adore you with all my life.” Frida Kahlo wrote these devoted lines to her beloved Diego Rivera in January 1948. «His absence from him makes me unbearable. I place her return among the sweetest wishes I can formulate », Théodore Géricault wrote in August 1822 to his idolized Madame Trouillard. They are just a couple of samples of the 34 letters full of love and aesthetic judgments that fifteen painting geniuses wrote over the last two centuries and that the Thyssen is now exhibiting together with some of his best works.
Letters often accompanied by sketches and drawings that reveal the intimacy and the aesthetic and vital desires of their authors. Handwritten letters from painting masters that the French Anne-Marie Springer collects and that the museum exhibits until September 25 distributed in several of its rooms. They are the most valuable jewels in the collection of letters and postcards signed by painters such as Delacroix, Degas, Manet, Monet, Matisse, Cézanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Léger, Pissarro, Juan Gris, Egon Schiele, Frida Kahlo or Lucien Freud and that are exhibited for the first time in Spain.
“The writing of many of these letters is as revealing as the paintings of their authors and they reveal realities that we ignore,” agree the artistic director of Thyssen, Guillermo Solana, and the owner of the letters. «There are spectacular pieces for their content. They are letters of magnificent honesty and when reading them we can feel the guts of the artists », says the proud owner of it.
Letter from Egon Schile to his furious wife together with the canvas ‘House by the River. The old city’ (1914) /
The letters have been selected by Clara Marcellán, curator of the exhibition and curator of modern painting at the Thyssen, who has respected the criteria that gave rise to this unique collection, initially limited to love letters. «But in them we also find the expression of ideas –which painters sometimes illustrate with small sketches–, insecurities, the defense of their art, the celebration of triumphs, details of the creative process of a work, references to historical events and a great variety of feelings that bring us closer to the life and personality of the artists and in a different way”, summarizes the curator.
careful calligraphy
We thus know that Delacroix finds happiness “in being satisfied with oneself,” as he writes to Josephine Forget. That Van Gogh, with careful calligraphy, was already considered beside himself when he arrived in Arles, where he felt more than happy. «The beautiful sun here, in the middle of summer. It hits you on the head and I have no doubt that one ends up going crazy. But as it was before, I do nothing but enjoy it», the unstable red-haired painter writes to Émile Bérnard in August 1888. He also describes ‘The unloaders in Arles’, the work he was painting and next to which your letter is displayed.
Gauguin, also with a neat and tight calligraphy, wrote an aesthetic manifesto in the letter he sent from Tahiti in 1899 to his friend William Molard, in response to the unfavorable criticism of André Fontainas in the ‘Mercure de Fance’. “The Thames was pure gold” describes Monet to Alice Hoschende, his second wife in February 1901, whom he will share with him about his difficulties in London and Norway. Matisse tells his wife about his trips through Morocco with countless sketches and Juan Gris tells in his letters to Josette, his wife, the details of his work for Diaghilev’s ballets.
Special attention deserves the letters written in time of war by Egon Schiele, Fernand Léger, Gala –Dalí’s wife and muse– or Max Pechstein. “I have been assigned to the 75th Regiment, to the ‘vigilance service’”, Egon Schiele informs Edhit Harms, his future wife, in June 1915. “The shells pass over my head”, Léger tells Jeanne Lohy in January of the same year. “Don’t walk through the woods, anywhere where they could kill you or take you prisoner,” she begs Gala to her first husband, Paul Éluard in November 1916, in the heat of World War I.
Anne-Marie Springer began collecting love letters in 1994, after the birth of her daughter “so that she could leave her a legacy of words when e-mail and SMS began to threaten writing.” Currently there are more than 2000 pieces that she treasures in her collection. The oldest dates from the 15th century and the most recent from the 1970s. The first letter that caught her attention was one signed by a young Napoleon Bonaparte to his wife, Josephine. She then acquired hundreds of letters, some as curious as one in which a lover of Victor Hugo demanded that the writer return her panties.
In recent years, Springer has expanded his initial interest in romantic correspondence to diverse subjects, such as history, literature, entertainment, music and all the arts in general. He has focused on letters from painters in which he highlights “the coherence between their art and his thought.” He assures that he finds in them evident correspondences between the pictorial style and calligraphy, more than evident in the case of Egon Schiele.
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