This is the first publication of a series of letters written over a fifty-year period by the renowned artist, doctor, critic, filmmaker and novelist Brian O’Doherty.

As a pioneering post-minimalist conceptual artist in New York in the 1960s, O’Doherty has also been known as the artist Patrick Ireland between 1972 and 2008. The former produced the first exhibition of conceptual art to dispense with the gallery, Aspen 5+6, in 1967, and the first conceptual portrait, Portrait of Marcel Duchamp, in 1966 - 67, which used an electrocardiographic tracing of Duchamp’s heart.

Patrick Ireland was an early installation artist producing a unique series of over 135 Rope Drawings (1973 - ) that use venetian cord and house paint. O’Doherty, is however also the internationally renowned author of the ground-breaking essays, Inside the White Cube (1976), which critiqued the constructs underlying the modernist gallery space. He also is a prize-winning filmmaker (Hopper’s Silence (1983) and novelist (The Strange Case of Mademoiselle P in 1992, and a Booker Prize nominee for The Deposition of Father McGreevy in 2000).

This book of letters give a remarkable insight into the artist’s thinking about his art as it was developing. But they also provide the personal, political and cultural contexts in which the art was made, one of the most significant periods in recent art and its history by one of its most complex and fascinating artists.

This book consists of fifty letters written over fifty years by the polymath artist Brian O’Doherty (b. 1928). The majority have never been previously published. They are addressed to friends, critics, curators, museum directors and scholars by hand, typewriter and computer, illustrating the vast changes in communication technology over the same period.

Apart from a letter by critic Herbert Read (1956) and cultural theorist Roland Barthes (1967), all are written by O’Doherty. The tone ranges from the informal and chatty to the more formal, depending on the relationship with the recipient.

The editor provides notes with each letter, where an art movement, person or place mentioned may be unfamiliar to the reader. Each letter is prefaced with the name of the recipient and the date or presumed date where absent. Selected images act as reference points to a work or works being discussed in a letter.

The editor adopts a minimalist approach, leaving spelling mistakes and insertions intact to maintain the spontaneity and freshness of the letters. Written without any art jargon, the letters are accessible and entertaining, sprinkled with wit and humour. Many begin with the words “in haste” which illustrates the hectic nature of the writer’s overlapping lives as artist, critic, teacher, administrator, filmmaker, writer and novelist.

The supportive, collegiate nature of the artists’s working relationships shines through the correspondence. It also provides a different tone to formal historical analysis, using an intimate, time-honoured but dying form of communication.

These letters are an alternative route into the study of a fascinating artist with a distinctive voice and unique sensibility.

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Dear: Selected Letters from Brian O'Doherty 1970s to 2018

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