林中斌 部落格 / Blog Chong-Pin Lin

Jennifer Schuessler, “Calligraphy? Chicken scratch? Both, actually”

The New York Times International Edition,

July 19, 2018

accessed July 24, 2018

http://iht.newspaperdirect.com/epaper/viewer.aspx

書法表露人格。中西皆然。
左邊是7歲的小女孩一絲不苟的書信。她將統治日不落的大帝國。右邊是加速帝俄朝廷崩潰的"瘋僧"。

Compare the handwritings. On the left is the tidy letter of a seven-year-old girl who would become queen ruling an empire that saw no setting sun. On the right is that of the "mad monk" who corrupted the Tsarist Russian court before it collapsed in 1917. (Queen Victoria vs Rasputin)

We are living in a golden age of both fretting about handwriting and fetishizing it. Polemicists lament that cursive is going the way of the dodo. Meanwhile, oldschool devotees of pen and paper post their work on social media with hashtags like #snailmail and #penpal.

“The Magic of Handwriting,” an exhibition at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York, might seem at first glance to be part of this nostalgia. Instead, it simply luxuriates in the humble, intimate and sometimes very messy traces that some of the great figures of history have left behind.

The show features some 140 items from the encyclopedic holdings of the Brazilian collector Pedro Corrêa do Lago, who got his start at the age of 11, when he wrote to prominent figures to ask for their autographs. Today, he owns roughly 100,000 letters, notes, receipts, manuscripts, signed photographs and other pieces documenting notable lives in the arts, politics, science and other fields.

During an interview at the museum, the loquacious Mr. Corrêa do Lago, 60, called his collection “a symbolic snapshot of Western culture over the past 500 years.” He also sees it as it the product a kind of madness. “It became an absolutely crazy project that drowned all the money I made,” he said, with a laugh. “I should be in a straitjacket.”

Here is a sampling of items from the exhibition, and the sometimes quirky, sidelong glances they offer at their creators.