Brief aan Philip Zilcken Possibly 1900 - 1911

Willem Witsen wrote this letter to Philip Zilcken in 1900, using ink on paper, a medium as immediate as a thought. The writing leans in and out of legibility, with the ink’s dark strokes like a landscape. Look at how the letter ‘W’ dances throughout the text, a repeated motif that seems to pull the whole composition together. There’s a rhythm in the looping ascenders and descenders, like a musical score where each note is a word, or a thought. It makes me think of Cy Twombly’s calligraphic paintings, where writing blurs into abstraction, and the meaning isn’t so much in the words themselves, but in the gesture, the feeling of the hand moving across the page. This letter reminds us that art is always a conversation, a passing of notes between friends, a sharing of ideas and intimacies that transcend time. It’s a beautiful reminder that meaning is fluid, and that sometimes, the most profound communication happens in the spaces between the lines.