Jerry Saltz at New York Magazine:
Does anyone write love letters anymore? We send emails. Or worse, texts, emoji. Fast, short, disposable. Once, love letters were slow to make and slower to arrive. They were keepsakes, confessions, feelings made physical. They had form. They were a genre unto themselves: often florid, achingly raw, very private. I’ve written them. Maybe you have, too. Now they’ve all but vanished — and with them, a particular architecture of emotion.
The Frick’s luminous new show, “Vermeer’s Love Letters,” captures the essence of that lost world. Curator Aimee Ng says it’s “a very Frick show,” by which she means there are no gimmicks or didactics, just the art. Three paintings, one room, no men. Each painting features two women — a lady and her servant — as well as a letter either being written or accepted. Only one painting, The Love Letter (on loan from the Rijksmuseum in the Netherlands), is explicitly identified as a billet-doux, but all three are suggestive of interior dramas; secret vulnerabilities and joys; two selves reaching toward one another.
more here.
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