Letter from Oskar Kokoschka to J.P. Hodin

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[Translation/transcription]

Villeneuve

27 August 1972

My dearest Master Pepi,

Your book 'Modern Art and the Modern Mind' is perhaps the only one that renders perfectly clearly the demise of the mechanised world as reflected in the visual arts. And perhaps it's your best book. In this respect you're head and shoulders above the people who now write about art but have neither the eyes to see (they just gawp) nor the desire to know what's really happening before us and to us today. You are, thank God, fully alert and you demonstrate this in your book.

Do come again soon! I need to see you both as often as possible in the short time I have left. And bring the book that you wrote about in your kind letter. I never received it.

I embrace you, yours OK

My darling Pamela, the beautyfull one, I can feel with you in these days when you have to say good by to the place where you spent your childhood. Although I never have been there, I too loved the home, the garden, the house and the ocean in Cornwall. I wonder whether it is necessary to part with it? If you both do not need the bloody money urgently then, please, postpone the sale because it is the most unprofitable time changing a place where you had been born and grown up as a wild, beautyful creature, for money, that has lost its value since it has become paper without any value in gold or silver as in the days of your childhood. It makes me feel so sorry for the stones, rooms, the air of the house, the lawns, trees and flowers within the enclosing gate where your blissfull youth had been spent. My beloved darling, think it over before it all really becomes 'time spent'!

My beautyfull one I love you and kiss you tenderly, yours devoted OK

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