The Art of Handwriting as Practiced by Famous Artists: Georgia O’Keeffe, Jackson Pollock, Marcel Duchamp, Willem de Kooning & More

OKeeffeHand

Click each image for a larg­er ver­sion

Did­n’t we used to hear all sorts of grum­bling about the dis­ap­pear­ance of the hand­writ­ten let­ter? What a relief those com­plaints seem now to have sub­sided, leav­ing us in peace to effi­cient­ly type to one anoth­er about how we find pieces of long­hand cor­re­spon­dence fas­ci­nat­ing pure­ly as arti­facts of our favorite his­tor­i­cal fig­ures. If you share that fas­ci­na­tion, have a look at The Art of Hand­writ­ing, an exhib­it from the Smith­so­ni­an’s Archives of Amer­i­can Art now on dis­play through Octo­ber 27 at Wash­ing­ton D.C.‘s Lawrence A. Fleis­chman gallery, which show­cas­es not only the artis­tic aspects of hand­writ­ing, but the hand­writ­ing of actu­al artists. “An artist might put pen to paper just as he or she would apply a line to a draw­ing,” says the exhi­bi­tion’s site. “For each artist, a lead­ing author­i­ty inter­prets how the pres­sure of line and sense of rhythm speak to that artist’s sig­na­ture style. And ques­tions of biog­ra­phy arise: does the hand­writ­ing con­firm assump­tions about the artist, or does it sug­gest a new under­stand­ing?” Plus, we have here the ide­al test of those hand­writ­ing analy­sis booths at coun­ty fairs — could they detect these artis­tic per­son­al­i­ties?

deKooningHand

Just above, we have a page of abstract expres­sion­ist painter Willem de Koon­ing’s mis­sive in light-blue ink of March 28, 1966 to friend and fel­low abstract expres­sion­ist Michael Loew. (They’ve even includ­ed the enve­lope.) At the top of the post, you’ll find a page anoth­er painter, the famous­ly blos­som-focused Geor­gia O’Ke­effe, wrote to New Mex­i­co mod­ernist Cady Wells in 1939. The sub­ject of the let­ter? “O’Ke­effe wor­ries that Wells does­n’t like a paint­ing she has bought and sug­gests replace­ments; and describes an argu­ment she had with a friend.” That descrip­tion comes from the Smith­so­ni­an’s cat­a­log, as does this one: “[Jack­son] Pol­lock writes with descrip­tions of his new home in Springs, on Long Island, and dis­cuss­es his work and that of oth­er artists.” You can also view both pages of that evi­dent­ly unscan­dalous piece of com­mu­ni­ca­tion on the site. They’ve even got let­ters com­posed by hand in oth­er lan­guages, such as Mar­cel Duchamp writ­ing to his sis­ter Suzanne (below) on Jan­u­ary 15, 1916. Don’t wor­ry if you can’t read French, or if you think you can’t con­tex­tu­al­ize the per­son­al con­tent of any of the let­ters at all; focus on, as the Archives of Amer­i­can Art sug­gests, how “every mes­sage brims with the per­son­al­i­ty of the writer at the moment of inter­play between hand, eye, mind, pen, and paper.” That, and the that hope school­child­ren won’t have to endure cur­sive lessons many gen­er­a­tions longer.

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

Vir­ginia Woolf’s Hand­writ­ten Sui­cide Note: A Painful and Poignant Farewell (1941)

Font Based on Sig­mund Freud’s Hand­writ­ing Com­ing Cour­tesy of Suc­cess­ful Kick­starter Cam­paign

Fran­cis Ford Coppola’s Hand­writ­ten Cast­ing Notes for The God­fa­ther

See F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Hand­writ­ten Man­u­scripts for The Great Gats­by, This Side of Par­adise & More

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on lit­er­a­ture, film, cities, Asia, and aes­thet­ics. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­lesA Los Ange­les PrimerFol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.


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Comments (4)
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  • Rain,adustbowlstory says:

    How could you love some­one with­out know­ing what their hand­writ­ing looked like?

  • Rain,adustbowlstory says:

    How could you love some­one with­out know­ing what their hand­writ­ing looked like?

  • jish-wa says:

    I’m assum­ing the first two sen­tences of this post are iron­ic. It’s inter­est­ing how typ­ing and hand­writ­ing pro­duce quite dif­fer­ent sen­tence struc­ture and end result to each oth­er. I think both have their advan­tages though, and of course the old school used to bang stuff out on their type­writ­ers. Weird to think of a world only 30 years ago when most men would­n’t even have a go at typ­ing

  • jish-wa says:

    I’m assum­ing the first two sen­tences of this post are iron­ic. It’s inter­est­ing how typ­ing and hand­writ­ing pro­duce quite dif­fer­ent sen­tence struc­ture and end result to each oth­er. I think both have their advan­tages though, and of course the old school used to bang stuff out on their type­writ­ers. Weird to think of a world only 30 years ago when most men would­n’t even have a go at typ­ing

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