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

The Art of the Postcard: Home-made and Crafted Cards

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Bishop’s interest in the picture postcard influenced her own visual arts practice, which included watercolors, collage, photography, crafts, and collecting. Bishop artfully modified postcards she purchased and she also made her own postcards. Her modifications to purchased postcards tended to break down the separation between picture and text (1). She often wrote witty captions directly on the picture that “corrected” its quality, scale, or perspective: on an image of downtown Cos Cob, CT she wrote that “they have eliminated about 200 cars + sound effects.” She was equally attentive to the visual qualities of the text side, including the choice of postage stamp, punctuation marks (such as ellipses and diagonal lines used to indicate paragraph breaks), and the vertical or horizontal spacing and typed or handwritten nature of the text. On a “Christmas” postcard Bishop sent to Lloyd Frankenberg, red and green rubber stamps replace a written message.

Bishop often made her own postcards, beginning with a 1936 French photocard depicting Bishop and Louise Crane as male boxers (with the help of a studio prop). She admired the tradition of hand-crafted postcards (Staff 67-68, Willoughby 108), and sent them to mark a holiday or special occasion, as in the embroidered matador she purchased for Frani Blough in Spain, and the congratulatory fabric and glitter postcard bird she sent to Polly Hanson from Brazil. Bishop’s visual decoration of envelopes and stationery extended the pre-history of picture postcards (Staff 24-29, 33-35); examples include envelopes adorned with a rubber-stamped globe and an appliqued lizard, and a 1950 picture-card Bishop created for Loren McIver, with her watercolor of an apple tree in the top half mirrored by the text below. 

Bishop connected the picture postcard’s reliance on photomechanical reproduction to modernist collage. Her re-use of “found” antique cards, her creation of numerous collage postcards from product labels (including a nineteenth-century engraved cigar box label which she turned into a 1957 Christmas postcard), her choice of postcards depicting Joseph Cornell boxes and a Robert Motherwell collage with a torn stamp, all reflected Bishop's keen awareness of how postcard images—understood as box-like displays or collections of copied or found objects—extend and transform a collage aesthetic. Bishop's creation of two Cornell-inspired collage boxes is of a piece with her postcard practice, aligning her with John Ashbery, Joe Brainard, and Ray Johnson, as word-image artists who made the picture postcard central to their poems, collages, and “mail art” (Blom, Cran, Davis, Shamma). 

1. Bishop’s picture postcards demonstrate her visual poetics, defined by Elisabeth Frost “as writing that explores the materiality of word, page, or screen. Combining text with image and/or highlighting the materiality of the medium, visual poetics privileges acts of seeing in acts of reading” (340).
 

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