The legendary Hope Diamond may sparkle in its vault at another museum down the street, but at the Smithsonian’s Donald W. Reynolds Center for American Art and Portraiture in Washington, D.C., something much more precious is on display. Protected under glass in a small exhibition on the first floor is evidence of a most cherished treasure sought by all—love and passion.

“A Thousand Kisses: Love Letters from the Archives of American Art” is a new exhibition featuring love letters written by such artistic luminaries as Frida Kahlo, Lee Krasner, Gio Ponti, Abbott Handerson Thayer and Xavier Gonzalez.

“If only you knew how I want you, my darling, my darling! You will know when we are together and I can prove it,” reads an 1889 letter by American painter Walter Gay (1856-1937) to his fiancée Matilda Travers (circa 1866-1943).

“My soul hangs upon your love—my lips burn to touch your neck—your eyes—your fingertips,” sculptor John Storrs (1885-1956) wrote his wife, Marguerite De Ville Chabrol (1881-1959), in 1926.

Accompanied by photographs of artists with their wives, husbands and lovers, these written vows of love and affection— many featuring intimate and humorous illustrations—offer a vivid look at the passion of some of America’s best-known artists.

Passion

“We wanted to find letters that told us something about the artists themselves; or those defining a historically important moment,” says Liza Kirwin, curator of the exhibition and a 28-year employee of the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art. “And, of course, we were looking for passion.”

In some cases, they hit all the marks. Take, for example, a 1953 letter by Finnish-born architect Eero Saarinen (1910-1961) to Aline Bernstein (1914-1972). Bernstein, an art editor and critic for The New York Times, had met with Saarinen for an article on the General Motors Technical Center in Warren, Mich. In his letter to Bernstein, Saarinen describes his sudden attraction to her and embellishes the paper with architectural sketches and notes on projects he had on his mind: the Milwaukee Cultural Center, a site for the University of Michigan and the Kresge Auditorium and Chapel at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“[T]he thing I liked most about the monument,” he wrote, perhaps referring to the Milwaukee County War Memorial, “was that it was a beautiful result of you and I being close together—the funny thing about it is that it proves your point...that I translate everything into architecture.”

Saarinen—who is also known as the designer of air terminals at Dulles and Kennedy airports and the Gateway Arch in St. Louis—expressed a desire for a long courtship. But, throwing caution to the wind, the architect was soon divorced from his wife of more than 10 years and remarried to Bernstein, in whom he found “a soul mate, a partner and a passionate advocate of his work,” Kirwin writes in the exhibition.

“Their love affair was very much entwined with his architecture career,” Kirwin says. “They connected on so many different levels.”

Inside jokes

Kirwin’s familiarity with the archives led her immediately to some of the letters she was seeking. Lesser-known love letters, however, were more difficult to find, forcing the archivist to search the database, catalogs and the collection itself “in funny ways,” she says.

“I did a [database] search on ‘love,’ but we don’t catalog along those lines,” she explains. “So I searched for ‘fiancée,’ ‘wife’ and ‘husband.’”

But locating the letters was just the beginning. There are the demands of transcription. Aside from differentiating a slip of the pen from the cross of a ‘t’, the editors had to identify names of friends, inside jokes, outdated phrases and even intimate nicknames. They came across one puzzler in a letter by painter Elliot Orr (1904-1997), who addressed his wife, Elizabeth (1908-2002), as his “Dearest Piepet.” What could this mean? Could the letter have been intended for someone else? A family member offered the probable answer: Elizabeth Orr worked in a medical lab. “Pipette,” referring to a piece of lab equipment, may well have served Orr as a term of endearment.

The exhibition has a darker side as well. “God you mean a lot to me—it’s never been like this before in my life,” painter Joan Mitchell (1925-1992) writes to Michael Goldberg (born 1924), a fellow abstract painter for whom Mitchell left her husband. “I’m using the paint off your palette—I feel so close to you,” she continues. At the time Goldberg was at the Rockland State Hospital in Orangeburg, N.Y., where he was spending six months in lieu of doing prison time for writing fraudulent checks from the account of Mitchell’s husband.

“I miss you and wish you were sharing this with me...It would be wonderful to get a note from you,” abstract painter Lee Krasner (1908-1984) wrote to her husband, artist Jackson Pollock (1912-1956), from Paris in 1956. At the time their marriage was in trouble. Three weeks later, while still vacationing in Paris, Krasner learned of Pollock’s death in a car crash.

Hard copy

The tone of the letters ranges from the overtly sexual to parental doting, and even to fan-mail. While the exhibition plays to the “voyeur within,” it is voyeurism, quite literally, of the highest art; an exercise that brings life and spark to our understanding of history. Kirwin wonders how blog-it-all generations of the future will understand something as exotic as a piece of intimate, eagerly awaited “hard copy” like the letters in “A Thousand Kisses.”

“A lot of these letters were about the endurance of desire,” Kirwin explains. “A letter would take forever to get to its destination, and then the writer had to wait forever for the response. They couldn’t just pick up the telephone. Relationships and courting developed over long periods. This is something that may be lost to people today, because of the instant access that we have.”

The exhibition is accompanied by a book, With Love: Artists’ Letters and Illustrated Notes (Collins, 2008) by Kirwin and Archives Specialist Joan Lord.

“A Thousand Kisses: Love Letters from the Archives of American Art” will be on view at the Donald W. Reynolds Center for American Art and Portraiture through June 2, 2008.