Books June 1996
Miss Rat & the artists
A review of Marianne Moore and the Visual Arts: Prismatic Color by Linda Leavell.
Perhaps the most recognized images of Marianne Moore (1887–1972) are as poetry’s elder statesman in a tricorn hat, appearing with Joe Louis on the cover of Esquire magazine or lobbing out the first ball at a Yankees series opener. Such unlikely photo-ops capture the later celebrity enjoyed by the poet, but little of her renowned decorum and restraint (though idiosyncrasy had long been a hallmark of her poems). Currently on view in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition “As They Were: 1900–1929” are two portraits of Moore done by artists of the poet’s acquaintance from New York art circles in the early 1920s. The likenesses, an ostrich-necked bust of Miss Moore by French-American sculptor Gaston Lachaise and a pencil sketch by William Zorach of a braid-bedecked Marianne decorously posed, give us the poet in her youth. That Moore represents only one of several poets and writers pictured in the Met’s...
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