Getty relevanceCHRISTOPHER Knight’s five steps for bringing...

Getty relevance

CHRISTOPHER Knight’s five steps for bringing the Getty into the life of L.A. [“Restoring Laurels Lost,” Feb. 5] are wonderful. One of the best art essays I’ve read since I returned to L.A. 10 years ago. Here’s my own sixth step:

The Getty should go out and get three easel paintings, one each by Matisse, Picasso and Mondrian, the best that money can buy.

R.B. KITAJ

Los Angeles

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I think Christopher Knight was speaking of himself when he stated that personal grandiosity is one crippling issue. Knight’s continued ad nauseam, negative, acerbic diatribes about the Getty and its infrastructure provide little or no new information compared with the unjustified length of his articles. His attempts to suck readers in with new approaches always end with the same vendetta-like non sequitur. Let the Getty move forward with their audit and see how it unfolds. Knight needs to get back to critiquing art and get a life.

JANET DAVIDS

Manhattan Beach

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Cryptic credits

A week after being castigated for omitting the writers’ credits from its annual “Sneaks” edition, Calendar in part atones by running David Kipen’s “The Pen Is Mightier,” [Feb. 5] billing itself as “a first step toward challenging auteurism with a powerful schreiberist countermyth.” While I wholeheartedly applaud the author’s wish to honor the screenwriter, Kipen’s exemplary list, by starting off with James Agee, demonstrates the difficulty in pinning down exact credits. Kipen claims that a “robust anticlericalism” thematically unites the adaptations of “The African Queen” and “The Night of the Hunter,” citing “Agee’s choices, both of materials and accentuation.”

Critic-essayist-poet Agee was a very important writer, but only an intermittent screenwriter, of whom it could be said that his projects chose him, not the other way around. What’s more, it is no longer a secret that when Agee turned in a ludicrously over-length first draft of “The Night of the Hunter,” the whole thing had to be rewritten by first-time director Charles Laughton. Alas, a “countermyth” is after all still just another myth.

PRESTON NEAL JONES

Los Angeles

Jones wrote “Heaven & Hell to Play With: The Filming of ‘The Night of the Hunter.’ ”

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A pianistic passion

MARK SWED’S article regarding the “Appassionata” is magnificent [“Appassionata Unleashed,” Feb. 5]. I was born deaf, and after surgery at age 3, I gravitated to the piano. When I was 5 or 6, my first recording was that of the great Horowitz -- Beethoven’s “Appassionata” with the D-major sonata, Opus 10, No. 3. Even then, I knew the star of the LP was the “Appassionata.” I said, “I want to do this.”

The other great pianist, Rubinstein, also played the “Appassionata.” Horowitz and Rubinstein -- their names always went together. Who was the poet, who was the pianistic genius? For me, they were one and the same.

Why the “Appassionata”? It was the essential piece in the pianist’s repertoire. It was Beethoven at his best -- fire, passion, lyricism, spirituality, the religious slow movement with its variations on a chorale, and the tempestuous last movement. It was indeed the “Appassionata” that Horowitz recorded in the 1960s to set a benchmark for pianists -- and it did.

It is fantastic to see this sonata coming back into pianistic vogue. It is thrilling to see young pianists wishing to devour its passion and fury.

JEFFREY BIEGEL

Lynbrook, N.Y.