GERTLER MARK: (1891-1939) British painter. A scarce A.L.S., Mark, to the verso of a ...

GERTLER MARK: (1891-1939) British painter. A scarce A.L.S., Mark, to the verso of a colour picture postcard featuring a reproduction of a painting by Rubens, Paris, 1932, to his aunt, Annie Gertler. The artist writes, in full, ‘I heard from Minnie that Harry is better. I am very glad. I hope all goes well still. I will phone when I return to London. Love to all’. Together with a few pieces of unsigned printed ephemera comprising two different invitation cards to exhibitions of Gertler’s works at The Leicester Galleries and Whitechapel Art Gallery in London and a small 8vo catalogue of the New Year Exhibition of Pictures, Drawings and Sculpture by Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Artists at The Leicester Galleries in London, January 1954, featuring works by L. S. Lowry, Ford Madox Brown, Frank Brangwyn, Amedeo Modiglaini, Augustus John, Graham Sutherland, Henry Moore, Stanley Spencer, Wyndham Lewis, Paul Signac, Alfred Sisley, Duncan Grant, Walter Sickert, Terry Frost, John Piper, Ben Nicholson, Edgar Degas and Mark Gertler amongst others. Further including a series of unsigned incomplete autograph letters and notes by Valentine Dobree (1894-1974, Indian-born English artist, associated with the Bloomsbury Group and the lover of Gertler), four pages, 8vo, Richmond, n.d., to Mark Gertler, in ink and pencil. Dobree commences the first page of one letter ‘Terms like the “aura of my disfigured mentality” and the “rigidity of puritanical labels” occur to me as the memory of my first confused correspondence sweeps into my mind like a dark cloud which flashed thunder……’ further writing ‘I experienced the fever & madness of love, then the idyllic strain of fanciful pleasure, which shocked me out of myself with its sweetness & unrealism. I descended to earth filled with the fright of you’, and also adding a note in the margin, ‘I know I never ought to right (sic) like this to you because you do not love me but you can decide for yourself whether you want me or not’. The other pages state, in part, ‘The unconscious growth of nature creates shapes of life with an unpremidated (sic) spontanity (sic) ….The Artist in you is mostly unconscious if it exists at all….sex is definitely unconscious liquid in the mind poisoning the grey matter…..I don’t think anybody else has felt love like I have. It is because I have suppressed myself to such an extent that it has burst upon me…..’ Some age wear and creasing, particularly evident to Gertler’s postcard (which also has the postage stamp neatly removed), and a few small tears and areas of paper loss, FR to generally G, 8