Letter from Else Meidner to J.P. Hodin

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[Transcription/translation]

27 November 1968

Dear Dr Hodin,

If I now repeat and say to you: ‘Those who forget so much good grace one tends to regard with scornful face,’ you will call me a parrot! My letter vexed you, but that really was the last thing I wanted! You did in fact say something about a possible exhibition, though that may have been before your article. I have been taking a dessert-spoon of the said article like medicine every three hours, and you ask me whether I’ve read it! You may well have read the question in my last letter as an affront, but my dear Dr Hodin, surely you don’t believe I could have meant it that way. But how can I really thank you? I often wrack my brains about this. It would have been awful if you’d wanted me to be diplomatic, because then I’d have painted abstract paintings! Abhorrent to me are death, sickness, tradesmen in the house and abstract paintings. To say nothing of Papp¬ – Sch – – – – ! Excuse me. We live in an age of prodigious discoveries, not an age of great art. Dilettantism has found its way into modern art and is making itself at home there. I have gone about my work seriously and I have never conformed (!!) to the so-called pseudo-muse. I steered the same course even in my student days, though I was swimming against the tide. And we know what happened next. Now I am broken. Down with the pseudo-muse! It is good and important to exhibit serious and skillful work. That which goes against the pseudo-muse is now avant-garde! As a pseudo-painter I know that one exhibition does not yet mean success, and that’s what’s important, and everything I do will founder, because I am a wreck. When a man becomes a painter he does nothing but paint! But women are expected to do all the mundane things too, and that’s what’s ruined me.

In old admiration and gratitude,

Yours,

Else Meidner

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