Michelangelo was the last poet to show much talent as a painter. In our narrow century, poets have with few exceptions confined themselves to the art of words: Pound plunked away at opera (with dismal results), Cummings was a rough-and-ready dabbler in oils; but we have been spared the sculpture of Robert Lowell and the ballets of T. S. Eliot. It is charming to find that a poet secretly practices another art and consoling to know he’s no good at it. This is partly Schadenfreude and partly relief that talent is not a gift completely inevitable in its distribution.
After her death, Elizabeth Bishop’s cheery watercolors appeared on her Complete Poems, her Collected Prose, and her collected letters, One Art. Modest, sweetly colorful, and full of quiet exuberance, the paintings transposed to the visual world the deceptive innocence of her poems. Indeed, they seemed to have been drawn by children— no set of parallel lines ever parallel, no circle ever circular, perspective lost in some twelfth-century muddle of vanishing points, everything thumbed onto the page with the spirit not of art but of need. “Her method,” writes the editor William Benton, “for the most part consisted of making a simple drawing and, unceremoniously, coloring it in.” Exchanging Hats gathers the surviving three dozen or so fragile watercolors and drawings (as well as two box constructions indebted to Joseph Cornell), some of them now mysteriously missing and available only as slides.
Poetry and painting
