Brief aan Hendrick Peter Godfried Quack Possibly 1911 - 1917

This letter was written by Jan Veth to Hendrick Peter Godfried Quack from Krefeld in 1911, though you get the feeling that the place doesn't really matter. The flow of the ink across the page creates a kind of rhythm. The paper has aged, acquiring a delicate, almost fragile quality that speaks to the passage of time. Each stroke of the pen varies in pressure and density, reflecting the nuances of thought and feeling of the writer. Look at the looping ascenders and descenders of the letters, see how they create a dance on the page. It’s like watching someone think, isn't it? You could compare this to the work of Cy Twombly. Both share a love for the gesture of writing. Twombly, though, blows it up into abstraction, but here in Veth’s letter, it’s like seeing the seed of something similar. It's a conversation between artists, a dance across time and styles.