So a man in Wisconsin read my post about Martin Foss and contacted me. He’s been studying Martin Foss’s work for 40 years, and actually had correspondence with him back in the 1960s (Foss died in 1968). It was very touching communicating with this man, who is a sculptor. He wrote in his email to me:
“I have been studying his works for over forty years and have not been able to find anyone else to discuss his works with. I was a sculptor and taught at the University of Wisconsin for almost 30 years. I found modern theories of art to be inadequate and I read Martin Foss mainly because of how he explained the importance of art, poetry and drama. I decided to write a book or essay on the difference between Creating and Making as it pertains to the visual arts. I have worked on it off and on over the years while I was drawn back to the need to understand a ‘total picture’ of what the content of his books was really about. I had no help from anyone because I did not know anyone else interested in what he had to say. It took me about thirty years to really understand his explanation of Value, Existence, Being, and his theory of knowledge.”
And a later email from him after we got the Wikipedia page up:
“After so many years I have made contact with someone who has read at least one of his books, and equally important is how ready you are to dig up hidden material. Maybe I will see my remaining wish come true…that someone will pick up the ball and run with it. You know what I mean. Someone who will help preserve his name and ideas … and that has fallen to you now. Maybe I am being too presumptuous, but it is late at night for me.”
We’re still gathering information and data for the page. After doing a little research, I was able to contact his granddaughter Eliza (the internet is so amazing) and she’s going to help me fill in some missing facts. When you try to put a new page up on Wikipedia, there are all kinds of warnings and an interview process you have to go through (apparently, people must continually try to create wikipedia pages about themselves or to advertise their businesses…. which is not hard to believe.) So it felt like a true achievement, on many levels. Anyway, check it out: Martin Foss page on Wikipedia. I’m very proud of it.
Hopefully, this page will give Foss’s work some much-deserved attention.