In April 1944, Frida Kahlo wrote a frank, considerably annoyed letter to her gallerist and former lover, Julien Levy.
“I haven’t paint [sic] a lot as a result of my backbone bothers me so much and I’ve to put on a rattling corset (iron) and it has been hell for me, it’s so laborious to work with such a contraption in your physique!” she laments. “So child, don’t scold me for not sending you issues, and don’t inform me you might be dissatisfied with me.”
This letter is one in all six which are featured in season two of Getty’s Recording Artists podcast, Intimate Addresses. This new season makes use of artists’ letters, drawn from the archive of the Getty Analysis Institute, to light up the lives and personalities of a few of the 20th century’s most influential creators. Every episode facilities on one letter from one artist: Marcel Duchamp, Frida Kahlo, M. C. Richards, Benjamin Patterson, Nam June Paik, and Meret Oppenheim.
The letters are carried out by actor and playwright Anna Deavere Smith. Poet Tess Taylor hosts the present and interviews modern artists and artwork historians, who deliver historic, racial, and geopolitical context to the world through which the artists have been working and residing.
“We clearly needed to inform the story of 20th-century artwork by way of these letters,” Taylor says, “however we additionally needed to seize artists in these moments of their atypical lives, within the backstage of creating artwork as they have been falling in love, asking for cash, or working by way of ache.”
The artists write to household and associates, lovers, and collaborators about subjects that vary from their work to mutual associates to parenthood. Marcel Duchamp writes to longtime pal and fellow artist Man Ray after fleeing Nazi-occupied France to ask for assist promoting a murals. In a letter to musician David Tudor, Nam June Paik jokes in regards to the cockroaches in his studio condo earlier than making an earnest plea for cash — not for himself however for a fellow artist. And, on the onset of the ladies’s liberation motion, Meret Oppenheim writes to celebrity curator Harald Szeemann about his sexist mischaracterization of her deeply private work.
By the artists’ intimate and generally provocative phrases, the podcast weaves collectively a narrative of creativity, resilience within the face of the artwork world’s challenges, and the methods through which artists’ lives intersect with one another.
“These letters modified not simply how I considered artwork previously, but additionally how I see artwork within the current,” Taylor says.
You’ll be able to pay attention and subscribe to Recording Artists: Intimate Addresses wherever you get your podcasts and on the Getty website.
