Synopsis
Poet Elizabeth Bishop was also an accomplished painter. Here are 39 of her lovely, small-scale works, mostly watercolors.
| Details | | Publication Date: | 1996-10-01 | | Editor: | William Benton |
| Size | | Length: | 106 pages | | Height: | 10.0 in | | Width: | 8.8 in | | Thickness: | 0.8 in | | Weight: | 21.6 oz |
Publisher's Note
When the distinguished art critic Meyer Schapiro said that Elizabeth Bishop "writes poems with a painter's eye", Bishop was "very flattered: I'd love to be a painter". The fact is - though not many knew it - she painted throughout her life, as this handsome book, reproducing in full color forty of her works, demonstrates. The paintings were tracked down, identified, and collected by the poet and art writer William Benton, who arranged the first exhibit of Bishop's artwork (twenty-seven pieces) in January 1993 at the East Martello Tower Museum as part of the Key West Literary Seminar on Bishop's writing. William Benton gives the provenance, dimensions, and (where possible) the date of each work. In the second half of the book, he also cites many painterly passages from Bishop's writing.
Industry Reviews
"Free from all pretension and unmistakable private, [the paintings] are diary entries--more often about places than about people--that just happen to have been draw or painted. But when we close the book, we know what Meyer Shapiro meant when he said that Bishop wrote poems 'with a painters eye.'"
New York Times Book Review - John Russell (12/08/1996)
"Bishop's paintings and collages were undertaken in a strictly non-professional spirit, but they are the works of an intelligent amateur of painting, and it is not wishful to compare the spirit in which they are done with the sensibility that produced the poems."
New York Review of Books - James Fenton (05/15/1997)
"...Bishop is sophisticated and knowledgeable about art in a way that separates her from a primitivist like the Cuban Gregorio Valdes....[H]er paintings are not 'interesting' forays into an essentially alien form, nor are they divorced from the central intelligence of the poems, but, even if technically less sure, they come from the same extraordinary source and make a justified claim to attention in their own right."
Times Literary Supplement - Jamie McKendrick (02/20/1998)
"As it turns out, the great poet Elizabeth Bishop painted charming miniatures throughout her life, 40 of which are reproduced here. In his introduction the poet and art writer William Benton quotes Bishop saying, 'From time to time I paint a small gouache or watercolor and give them to friends...They are not art--NOT AT ALL.' He then aptly concludes, 'They are though.'"
Ellis
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