Okay, it’s a standard thing these days, to grouse about the lost art of letter writing. At least, it is for those of us old enough to remember the pleasure of receiving actual handwritten letters, enclosed in stamped envelopes and delivered to your front porch mailbox. But that’s not what this particular grousing is going to be about.
Instead, I want to lament the fact that future historians aren’t going to have the pleasure that I’ve had while researching the upcoming book celebrating 125 years of IMA history, Every Way Possible—the pleasure of opening musty file folders to discover inside letters written decades in the past. If you happen to find good ones—and I did—it’s the closest thing to time traveling that you’re likely to experience.
And among all of the letters I discovered in my research, the very best ones were those written by Kurt Pantzer. He who was an attorney and a member of a number of boards of directors, including that of the Art Association of Indianapolis, the group that later renamed itself the Indianapolis Museum of Art. (He was also an art collector, who became one of the most respected J.M.W. Turner scholars in the world. His collection of Turner works is one of the IMA’s jewels.) But for as busy as he was, Pantzer was a prolific letter writer—he would have a meeting with someone in the morning, and that evening he would write a letter to the same person, detailing what had occurred as a result of their meeting. Pantzer was a skillful writer who clearly liked the idea of creating a record of what he was doing in Indianapolis in the 1950s, ‘60s and early ‘70s. Read the rest of this entry »
