Paul Mintz, Untitled (2009). Courtesy of the Artist. |
At 11 West Mulberry Street in Baltimore, near the Enoch Pratt Free Library, a plaque rests on the worn face of a narrow old row house. As the plaque notes, Edgar Allan Poe was once “discovered” here, his tale yanked from a slush pile by three editors. But this is what the plaque leaves out: Although he married and died in Baltimore, Poe wandered far and often elsewhere, in search of work or love. Still, Poe has been lovingly adopted by Baltimoreans time and again as the miscreant favorite son of a country that did not treat him well in his brief lifetime (1809– 1849). George Bernard Shaw snorted in 1909: “Howbeit, Poe remains homeless.” Born in Boston, Poe was called “home” this year to Baltimore to mark his bicentennial.
The Baltimore Museum of Art has chosen to regard Poe in two starkly different exhibitions. The larger of the two, “Edgar Allan Poe: A Baltimore Icon,” unveils eighty-odd art works and related objects to document Poe’s influence on European and English visual artists. Regrettably, the exhibit is a bit short on the work of Arthur Rackham, the English illustrator, who responded to Poe’s writing with a rare versatility.
The gallery walls do, however, wink and glimmer with Frenchness. The serene rhythmic surge of Manet’s graphic line says more here of his own accustomed style than of Poe’s imaginative