Handwritten letters from famous artists
Letter writing is said to be a dying art, but in our age of emails and texts more people are going back to paper and develop a real love for handwritten correspondence. We listen for you some exciting and beautiful letters from artists and writers who inspired us.
- Love letters between Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West
“I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia. I composed a beautiful letter to you in the sleepless nightmare hours of the night, and it has all gone: I just miss you, in a quite simple desperate human way. You, with all your un-dumb letters, would never write so elementary a phrase as that; perhaps you wouldn’t even feel it. And yet I believe you’ll be sensible of a little gap. But you’d clothe it in so exquisite a phrase that it would lose a little of its reality.” – Vita Sackville-West
“Look here Vita — throw over your man, and we’ll go to Hampton Court and dine on the river together and walk in the garden in the moonlight and come home late and have a bottle of wine and get tipsy, and I’ll tell you all the things I have in my head, millions, myriads — They won’t stir by day, only by dark on the river. Think of that. Throw over your man, I say, and come.” Virginia Woolf
2. Alexander Calder and Ellsworth Kelly
Alexander Calder and Ellsworth Kelly maintained their friendship with frequent correspondences. The two artists would send letters , illustrated notes, postcards about their personal lives, mutual admiration and work.
3. Pablo Picasso and Jean Cocteau
Picasso wrote this colourful illustrated letter to Cocteau upon hearing that he was ill.
4. Frida Khalo and Diego Rivera
Across their 27 years of relationship, Frida Khalo and Diego Rivera exchanged passionate and poetic letters. She wrote about her emotions first in an illustrated diary and then by letters.
“Diego.
Truth is, so great, that I wouldn’t like to speak, or sleep, or listen, or love. To feel myself trapped, with no fear of blood, outside time and magic, within your own fear, and your great anguish, and within the very beating of your heart. All this madness, if I asked it of you, I know, in your silence, there would be only confusion. I ask you for violence, in the nonsense, and you, you give me grace, your light and your warmth. I’d like to paint you, but there are no colors, because there are so many, in my confusion, the tangible form of my great love.” Frida Khalo
