Vera Molnar (Hungarian-French, 1924–2023) Lettre de ma mère [Lettre de ma mère], 1990
Silkscreen on paper (sérigraphie sur papier)
32 × 42 cm
Exemplaire d'Artiste (EA) — Artist's Proof
Signed and dated in pencil, lower right
The Pettis Collection of Computer Art
PION.2026.124
Description
From Molnar's 'Lettres à ma mère' series (1981–90), reworking her late mother's handwriting into algorithmically varied lines — poised between the emotional and the systematic. Silkscreen on paper, artist's proof.
Begun in 1981, Vera Molnár’s Lettres de ma mère grew from her memory of the weekly letters sent by her mother, Erzsébet “Erzsi” Pollacsek, from Budapest after Molnár settled in Paris in 1947. Molnár was fascinated not only by what the letters said but by the behavior of the handwriting itself: relatively ordered at the left edge of each line, then progressively more nervous and irregular toward the right. She first translated this rhythm into zigzag drawings in her sketchbooks and, beginning in the 1980s, into computer programs that introduced increasing degrees of randomness. The resulting marks resemble writing but contain no words, transforming an intimate memory of her mother’s hand into an experiment in algorithm, gesture, and authorship. [1][2]
In 1990 the Vasarely Museum in Budapest published Lettres de ma mère as a portfolio of six blue screenprints after Molnár’s plotter drawings. Across plates I–VI, the simulated handwriting progresses from relative order toward increasingly dense disorder. This impression corresponds to Lettres de ma mère I, the most restrained first plate in that sequence. The work sits at an unusually personal point in Molnár’s pioneering exploration of computer art: a machine is not being used to eliminate the human hand, but to reconstruct the remembered character of one particular hand—the handwriting of her mother. [2][3][4]
[1] Zsofia Valyi-Nagy, Vera Molnar's Programmed Abstraction, University of Chicago, 2023 — the most important scholarly source, including reproductions of the 1981 sketchbooks and 1969 original letters. University of Chicago dissertation and download https://knowledge.uchicago.edu/records/rz26v-vch08
[2] Vera Molnár, My Mother's Letters: Simulation by Computer, Leonardo, Vol. 28, No. 3, 1995, pp. 167–170 — Molnár's own detailed explanation of the project and algorithm. Read Molnár's 1995 Leonardo article PDF https://ems.andrew.cmu.edu/2022f/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/molnar-mothers-letters.pdf
[3] The Yale Review, “My Mother's Letters,” 2026 — particularly useful because it reproduces all six 1990 plates I–VI individually from the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest. View all six Lettres de ma mère prints https://yalereview.org/article/vera-molnar-my-mothers-letters
[4] Bibliothèque nationale de France, catalogue record for Lettres de ma mère, documenting the Vasarely Museum, 1990; six blue screenprints; edition 40 + XX. BnF portfolio catalogue record https://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark%3A/12148/cb40534985m
