'A Thousand Kisses,' Signed by the Artist
At the Smithsonian's Reynolds Center, the Lost Art of the Love Letter

By Paul Richard
Special to The Washington Post
Sunday, February 10, 2008

The holiday -- on Thursday -- usually arrives overdone with sugar, schoolroom paste and candy, juvenile giggling. "A Thousand Kisses: Love Letters From the Archives of American Art" takes you past all that.

These artists' old love letters taste bitterer, for one thing. Forty are on view. Pulled out of their envelopes, and pulled out of their privacies, they've been put in glass vitrines in the Lawrence A. Fleischman Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution's Donald W. Reynolds Center for American Art and Portraiture in a one-room exhibition that's slow and dark and rare, a valentine for grown-ups.

Together they keep pointing to a central truth of Valentine's Day too frequently ignored. Which is: Cupid in his quiver carries arrows of two kinds, golden ones to kindle love, and leaden ones to end it.

Thought-darts of the latter sort fly among these missives, heavy as can be. The whole show aches with loss. Who writes love letters anymore?

That artists, being artists, are more amorous than the rest of us is pretty much a myth. But their calling does have perks. Peering at your canvas, or just staring into space, is not against the rules. You're allowed to take your time.

"I have just unlocked my little box and found your letter -- and the world has drifted off a thousand miles and left me alone with you again," painter Dennis Miller Bunker (1861-1890) wrote his beloved Eleanor not long before he died. "Platt my neighbor," he continued, referring to Charles Adams Platt (1861-1933), the architect who later would design the Freer Gallery of Art, "is amazed at the amount of time I can spend doing nothing, just as if thinking of you were an unimportant occupation."

He went on for 11 pages. Almost all the artists in "A Thousand Kisses" -- a few of whom are famous (Frida Kahlo, Eero Saarinen, Moses Soyer, Rockwell Kent), most of whom are not -- were similarly unhurried. In 1953, when Saarinen (Dulles Airport's architect) sat down to write his sweetie (the writer Aline Bernstein, whom he would later wed) he went on for 12 pages.

His letter, all in capitals, has crisp perspective drawings and architectural details in between its paragraphs. "A Thousand Kisses' " correspondents are artists, after all. They express themselves in pictures -- watercolors, rebuses, little studio sketches, exuberant cartoons -- not just in written words.

Xavier Gonzalez (1898-1993), to take just one example, left small illustrated love notes for Ethel, his wife, almost every day. The papers that he left to the Archives of American Art include many hundreds of them. Almost anything could prompt them -- a memory, a whim or the act of stepping out to get the morning paper. One that's on display shows him struggling home in the pose of Atlas, bowed beneath the towering gray weight of the Sunday New York Times.

In 1939, when passionate Frida Kahlo (who was married at the time to Diego Rivera) wrote her lover, Nikolas Muray, she closed with a red lipstick kiss that sits upon the page like a painting on a wall.

There are many kinds of love. Not all the missives on display are amorous or romantic. The ones that painter Moses Soyer sent in 1940 to his young son, David, who was then at summer camp, are affectionately paternal. Most are loving sketches of the Soyer family cats.

The note on exhibition that Hedy Lamarr sent "Dear Mr. Franz Kline" in 1959 is not a love letter exactly. The Hollywood actress and the New York abstract expressionist had never actually met. But it's close. It's a fan letter. "When I first saw one of your paintings," she begins, "I had to sit down because it did something to me." She closes with a question. "Are you by any chance of Austrian descent -- since I am. Please do let me know."

Typed fan letters like that are no trouble to read. But other letters shown are far more problematic. Their intimacy burns. "I'm using the paint off your palette," Joan Mitchell writes her lover, the painter Michael Goldberg, in 1951. "I'm drinking the beer you left on the windowsill -- & I'm kissing you -- this I do all the time."

Do you think you should be reading this? Gentlemen and gentlewomen aren't supposed to read other people's mail.

In the handsome little volume that accompanies her show, scholar Liza Kirwin, the Archives of American Art's curator of manuscripts, attacks this hesitance head-on.

"Love letters," she writes, "bring out the voyeur in most of us. These deeply personal communications have the power to make us blush."

And perhaps to make us mourn. What gives this show its ache is that the letter age is over. Not entirely, of course, a few well-brought-up people still compose with fountain pens, but pretty much it's gone. The love letter went with it. The telephone helped kill it, e-mail contributed, texting gave the coup de grace, and now the deed is done.

Those in love might nowadays key "luv ya" on their cellphones, but OMG who now has time to sit in fervent solitude intent on the beloved while inking letters one by one? Or the time to find a mailbox (where have they all gone?), the time for free imagining (the mail train, the steamship, the sense of distance crossed), or the time to burn expectantly awaiting a reply?

I'm gonna sit right down and write myself a letter, and make believe it came from you. Fats Waller used to sing that. Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Bill Haley sang it, too . Lotta kisses on the bottom, I'll be glad I got 'em. Now it sounds like an antique. These letters have aged as surely. Once pinioned to the present, they're now artifacts of the past.

Most people hardly know the Archives of American Art, but it serves as a huge resource for American art historians. Founded in Detroit in 1954 (by the historian E.P. Richardson and Michigan's Lawrence A. Fleischman, a dealer and collector), the archives at first collected little more than microfilm of archives from other institutions. It's grown a lot since then. Today its storerooms hold more than 16 million items, 2,000 oral histories and 5,000 collections. It merged with the Smithsonian 38 years ago.

The archives is still growing. It recently acquired, to cite just one example, all the business records of the Leo Castelli Gallery, 400 linear feet of files that show in fine-grained detail how that most ducal of art dealers (Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg and Frank Stella were all Castelli artists) did his subtle work.

Kirwin, at the archives, pulls a piece of paper from one Castelli file. It's a carbon of a letter from 1961. A customer, one gathers, had bought a work of art only to discover that he didn't really like it and had returned it to the gallery, asking, with apologies, for all his money back.

Did the dealer tell him to shove off? No, indeed, he did not. Castelli's letter, in its own way, is also about failed love. This is what he wrote:

"Please don't be troubled by your change of heart. High enthusiasm for paintings is a commendable condition, and premature commitment frequent. Fine art is expensive but the desire to own it is not. The gallery is not injured by your decision, but flattered by your spirited attentions."

That's how to sell art.

This is how Liza Kirwin, with comparable understanding, has sold us on her love letters. Too clever to install them in terms of bland chronology, they have been arranged instead, she says, "in terms of fervor, their intensity of passion."

Some time in 1914, the modernist John Storrs (1885-1956) wrote this panting poem to Marguerite Deville Chabrol, the woman he would marry.

My soul hangs upon your
love -- my lips burn to
touch your neck -- your
eye -- your finger tips --
to kiss each breast . . .

From there it just gets hotter. Storrs's letter is the climax of "A Thousand Kisses." Heartfelt is the power of this mild little show.

"A Thousand Kisses: Love Letters From the Archives of American Art"will remain on view in the Reynolds Center, Eighth and G streets NW, through May 30. The center is open daily from 11:30 a.m. until 7 p.m. The show's 40 letters are reproduced and transcribed in an book by Liza Kirwin with Joan Lord, who will sign copies in the center's bookstore on Valentine's Day, Thursday, from noon until 2 p.m. For information call 202-633-1000.