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JOSEPH DANIEL MASHECK
405 WEST 118TH STREET
NEW YORK, NEW YORK 10027

18 February 1984

Dear Frank Stella,

I think that the last you heard from me, re your lectures, was a double-edged comment on Malevich. Since then I caught up with the 2nd and 3rd lectures, thanks to your kindness in leaving the xeroxes, and I just want to report, for now, that I'm crazy about the Rubens part -- which must have been all the more exciting to hear "live."

As for one specific, where the point about being moved to tears comes up, I was reminded of something I had just recently been reading, "Mrs." (i. e. Anna) Jameson's SKETCHES OF ART, LITERATURE AND CHARACTER (Boston, 1866), especially where she tells of having been "blind to the merits of the Flemish painters" until she started catching onto P. P. R. in Germany: And-- "Certainly we have in these days mean ideas about painting--mean and false ideas! It has become a mere object of luxury and connoisseurship or virtú: unless it be addressed to our personal vanity, or to the puerile taste for ornament, show, furniture,--it is nothing. The noble art which was once recognized as the priestess of nature, as a great moral power capable of acting on the senses and the imagination of assembled human beings--as such applied by the lawgivers of Greece, and by the clergy of the Roman Catholic Church,--how is it now vulgarized in its objects! how narrowed in its application! (p. 214). Mrs. J. goes on at some length, but here's a nice detail for you: "The public--the national spirit, is wanting; individual patronage is confined, is misdirected, is arbitrary, demanding of the artist any thing rather than the highest and purest intellectual application of his art, and affording nor space nor opportunity for him to address himself to the grand universal passions, principles, and interests of human nature!" (p. 215; emphasis mine).

Then comes a paean to Rubens' "St. Theresa kneeling before Christ, and interceding for the souls in purgatory," in Antwerp (descript., not title), from which she best recalls the head of Adam, Eve and Mary Magdalene: "As I gazed upon this picture, a feeling sand deep into my heart, which did not pass away with the tears it made to flow, but has ever since remained there, and has become an abiding principle of action. This is only one instance, out of many, of the moral effect which has been produced by the painting" (p. 216; emphasis in orig.). There's more, too, but this seems most to

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