I was reading yesterday morning that about 120 original letters by Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh are to be exhibited, alongside the works he was writing about, later this year at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.
His letters are rarely shown in public due to their fragility and sensitivity to light. Most of the letters being used in the exhibition are addressed to his younger brother, Theo.
The museum apparently owns over 800 of the 902 letters known to have been written by van Gogh. The museum intends publishing them in a book in the near future.
I wonder what’ll happen in 50 or 100 years when a famous person is being honoured in a museum. Will they display their emails or perhaps their Twitter account.
If you ever became famous would you like having your private correspondence put on display?
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Once upon a time, people simply put in their will to have their personal correspondence destroyed. I guess that is not possible anymore. Now that so many new biographies have come out that emphasize that seamier sides of a public figure… you just wonder, don’t you? what will be done with all that overflow of mundane trivia?
What if you weren’t famous? My ancestors certainly weren’t and I do wonder how they would feel about my publishing their correspondence. The letters are a wonderful peek into their lives and time and I’m happy to be able to share them. However the collection of letters held by the library also includes letters written by my mother and I think she’d be mortified to know that they are there for anyone to read. I’m careful about what I write on my blogs and I delete all emails of a personal nature but I suppose that they are still floating around out in cyberspace somewhere.