Bishop, Elizabeth and William Benton. Exchanging Hats: Elizabeth Bishop Paintings. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1996. Print.

 

Contents:

 

William Benton, a poet and art critic, tracked down and compiled Elizabeth Bishop’s forty surviving art pieces, readying them for display in 1993. The phrase “exchanging hats” is a nod to Bishop's poem "Exchanging Hats" as well as the metaphorical. Hats can be several things, but in this case refer to the different jobs/mediums Bishop utilized during her lifetime. She went from a poet, to a short story writer, to a painter with ease, paying each project the same level of detail and focus.

 

This work combines Bishop’s forty surviving pieces with Benton’s own notes on each piece and, where appropriate, references to the more “artistic” lines and passages in Bishop’s poetry. It is interesting to note that Bishop was the original artist for some of the dust jackets of her published work, but otherwise kept her artistic “hat” a secret. These included the original publications of:

 

• The Complete Poems

• The Collected Prose

• One Art

 

In 1971, Bishop was quoted saying, "From time to time I paint a small gouache or watercolor and give them to friends ... They Are Not Art- NOT AT ALL." But, as we can see from the pages of this book, her reservations do her no good.

 

Critical Reaction:

 

"Bishop's... paintings are not 'interesting' forays into an essentially alien form, nor are they divorced from the central intelligence of the poems... they come from the same extraordinary source and make a justified claim to attention in their own right."

--Jamie McKendrick, Times Literary Supplement

 

"You can see Klee or Vuillard in her paintings and her poetry, not because she imitated them but because she liked them and saw what they saw... As Benton says and this delightful book shows, Bishop was 'her own best influence'." 

--Lavinia Greenlaw, Independent on Sunday