Elizabeth Bishop's Postcards: An Exhibition Main Menu Preface: By Ronald Patkus Online Exhibition Introduction Events News Works Cited Catalogue Key West Exhibition Elizabeth Bishop’s Postcards, held at Key West Literary Seminar’s Elizabeth Bishop House in Key West, Florida, from March 6, 2025 to May 3, 2025. Paris Exhibition Copyright © 2023 Vassar College Libraries

A Museum without Walls: Postcard Curation

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The diverse kinds of visual art, statues, monuments, architectural structures, and folk crafts depicted on the picture postcards chosen and sent by Bishop radically alter our understanding of the art and artists she admired. The Bishop who selected postcard images was not restricted by historical era, nation, media, or established distinctions of taste and value (see Appendix 2). In curating and circulating her own postcard “gallery” she put into practice the ideal of small, intimate artworks that can be “passed” from “hand to hand,” which she described in her “Gallery Note for Wesley Wehr” and “Poem” (Rosenbaum). Often Bishop chose a postcard depicting an artwork from a particular visit to a museum or gallery which she described in her text, as in her postcard of a John Marin painting of Cape Split, Maine, sent to Loren MacIver. Bishop recounts driving down 20 miles of dirt road to reach the Cape Split gallery, run by Marin's daughter-in-law, who mentioned that MacIver was having a show. That Bishop heard the news of MacIver's exhibition in remote Maine epitomizes the artistic network facilitated by the picture postcard. We can see this in Bishop’s repurposing of Kit Barker’s 1950 gallery exhibition announcement as a postcard, alerting MacIver to the show.

Through these postcards Bishop extended the museum’s reach, integrating art into everyday life and humble environments. Bishop wrote her John Marin postcard from a restaurant in Cape Split called “Mom's Place,” ending the card, “mom's donuts are real sinkers.” She noted in a 1956 postcard to Loren MacIver and Lloyd Frankenberg that “One of our weekend guests propped up the Schwitters M. chose for me on her breakfast tray each morning, she liked it so much” (VC 30.8). Margaret Miller created an informal display with the postcards Bishop mailed: she wrote Bishop in December 1935, “The Versailles postcards I have stuck in my mirror with a colored postcard of some wonderful Tiepolo in Chicago [...] it ‘goes’ so well with the Versailles gods that I shall try to hold over the arrangement until your return” (VC Miller 11.6).

Bishop's choice of postcard artwork often spoke “allegorically” to her own art, personal relationships, or the quotidian reality of her home: she wrote below Camille Corot’s “The Artist's Studio” “Why not try it this way?”, registering the deliberation evident in the artist’s gaze at her canvas, and commented to Alice Methfessel on the back of an image of Francesco del Cossa's Allegory of Autumn, “This is me in my garden—full of Good Resolutions, & cutting down the Grape Vine….” The latter postcard contains a confession of love—“I (honest) love you an awful lot”---that reappears in published form in the parenthetical stutter of “One Art”: “Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture / I love)”” (P 198). 

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