Long unpublished signed autograph letter, six pages, from Marcel Vertès to Carlo Rim. Written in a coarse hand in black ink on three stapled leaves, with an envelope and a newspaper clipping. A few faint spots of foxing and folds.

A long polemical letter in which Marcel Vertès, a year before his death, defends his attack on abstract art and reproaches his old friend Carlo Rim for failing to support him.

In this letter, whose occasionally faulty spelling and syntax are no doubt due to the artist's Hungarian origins, Marcel Vertès replies to his friend Carlo Rim, who had sent him a newspaper clipping containing an unfavourable review of his exhibition "Nous les abstraits", signed by Michel Georges-Michel. In the series of drawings he prepared for this exhibition at the Galerie Lucie Weill, Vertès mocks abstract artists and their admirers. The exhibition nevertheless seems to have pleased most journalists and visitors, as evidence of which he encloses another article, this time a laudatory one, with his letter. The artist launches all the same into a vehement defence of his drawings, which he concludes with assurance: "Someone had to cry out that the King is naked! I'm glad I made them, these period documents". Far from tempering his convictions, he brutally disparages the abstract artists: "To me, all of them, without exception, are charlatans - they don't know how to draw". He also dwells on the favourable reception given to his work by publishers: an album of lithographs was indeed issued by Léda editions on the occasion of the exhibition. This album had, moreover, become a bone of contention between the artist and his filmmaker friend.

After this plea, Marcel Vertès reproaches Carlo Rim for not having defended his exhibition, something he claims to forgive him in the name of their friendship. We learn that Vertès had asked Rim to help him "to put [his] captions into proper French" and to write a preface. Not sharing his views, Rim refused and even left unanswered an earlier letter in which the painter offered to present him with a copy of the album.

A more unexpected passage in this letter touches on the cinema, a field the two friends had in common: in 1953, Vertès received two Academy Awards for the sets and costumes he had created for John Huston's film Moulin Rouge, released in 1952. In his "post scriptum", he declines in these terms Carlo Rim's proposal that he take part in the Cannes Film Festival: "I like the Sun in Cannes, not watching films all day long". Vertès nevertheless sat on the jury of the May 1961 festival, a few months before his death in Paris on 31 October of the same year.