‘Solid cuteness’: Elizabeth Bishop’s Art of Simplicity

Elizabeth Bishop’s early work is marked by a simplicity of effect and naivety of tone that works against the opacity of the poetry’s subject. This chapter considers the disjunct that is set up within such poems as ‘Large Big Picture’, ‘Cirque d’Hiver’ and ‘Florida’ between the naivety of perception and the speaker’s knowingness. This poetic technique, which, I propose, Bishop appropriated principally from Rimbaud, but also from Joseph Cornell and the French Surrealists, works principally as a kind of parody of, and check against, the Modernist overvaluation of simplicity in primitive or childlike art, a tradition which she considers outdated and shameful, but to which she had nonetheless apprenticed herself. This childishness, this chapter proposes, opened up space for a new kind of lyric, one that is marked by clarity of expression and a provisionality of form, in which the simplicity of tone provides a counter to both the excess of childhood and the spectacle of travel. The latter half of the chapter considers the way John Ashbery has reformulated this interplay between naivety and knowingness in his own work.

Hopps, Walter (1932–2005)

Walter Hopps was an American art dealer and curator of modern and contemporary art. Best known for organizing the first museum retrospective of Marcel Duchamp in 1963 at the Pasadena Art Museum (now the Norton Simon), Hopps was a pioneering example of the independent, creative curator, a model that emerged in the 1960s in the United States From his start as an organizer of unconventional shows of California painters on the cultural fringe of conservative Cold War-era Los Angeles, Hopps became one of the most respected, if unorthodox, curators of his generation, holding a dual appointment at the end of his life as 20th-century curator at Houston’s Menil Collection and adjunct senior curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. Some of his noted exhibitions include: in Pasadena, a 1962 group show that helped to define pop art, The New Paintings of Common Objects; the first U retrospectives of Kurt Schwitters (1962) and Joseph Cornell (1967); Robert Rauschenberg retrospectives in 1976 and 1997 at the National Museum of American Art and Menil Collection, respectively; a 1996 survey of Edward Kienholz for The Whitney Museum of American Art; and a James Rosenquist retrospective in 2002 at the Guggenheim.

Assemblage

Assemblage is an artistic form that involves the transformation of non-art objects into two-dimensional or three-dimensional artistic compositions. Together with abstraction, it has been considered one of the two most significant innovations of modern art. The term assemblage was first used in 1953 by critic, philosopher and poet Max Loreau in describing French artist Jean Dubuffet’s series of imprint collages of butterflies’ wings. The term was popularized by the Museum of Modern Art’s 1961 exhibition The Art of Assemblage, which showcased the work of early 20th-century European artists, such as Marcel Duchamp, Pablo Picasso, George Braque and Kurt Schwitters, and Americans such as Joseph Cornell, Man Ray and Robert Rauschenberg.