Sylvia Plath: Drawings

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Chronicle of Higher Education, June 22, 2001, Carlin Romano, "Martin and Hannah and Sylvia and Ted," p. B21. Now cast an eye over these wonderful drawings. You wouldn't connect them with that poetry at all. And you wouldn't connect them, either, with the prose Plath, the psychotic bobbysoxer of The Bell Jar. With these drawings, we get a third Sylvia Plath. You might notice that – at least in the selection on show – human figures are few and far between. Apart from a profile sketch of Hughes there are two, both turned away, one of them with a hand in an anxious clutch. But even these are breezy accounts of things in the world. Hargrove, Nancy Duvall, The Journey toward Ariel: Sylvia Plath's Poems of 1956-1959, Lund University Press, 1994.

After Plath’s death, The It-Doesn’t-Matter Suit, a book for children, was also discovered among her papers and published posthumously. The story features Max Nix, a resident of Winkelburg, who happily acquires a modest “woolly, whiskery brand-new mustard-yellow suit.” Nicci Gerrard wrote in the Observer,“There’s no disturbance in the world of Winkelburg: even Max’s desire for a suit is as shallow and clear as the silver stream that runs like a ribbon through the valley.” Despite the lasting impression of Plath’s bleak art and early death, Gerrard concluded that “small pieces of happiness like this little book remind us of her life.” Several years earlier, the teenage Plath had begun contouring her consciousness and mapping its psychological promontories, its luminous surfaces and its dark edges, rhapsodizing about the joy of living, thinking deeply about free will and what make us who we are, and composing her first tragic poem in response to a minor domestic accident. Two years before she shaded in what was becoming an all-consuming darkness in “The Disquieting Muses,” she wrote to her mother in a letter included in the posthumously collected Letters Home: Correspondence 1950–1963 ( public library): Anderson, Linda, Women and Autobiography in the Twentieth Century, Prentice Hall (Englewood Cliffs, NJ), 1996.Who is the Sylvia Plath we, her readers, think we know? Nearly half a century after her suicide, the great poet is capable of surprising us. A selection of her drawings that have just gone on display at London's Mayor Gallery shows us a new side of her. I found these drawings moving: not because they feed into the legend, but because they sidestep it. They bring us a fresh look at a woman now so barnacled with myth it's hard to see her clearly. And – wow – they're really good. Van Dyke, Susan R., Revising Life: Sylvia Plath's Ariel Poems, University of North Carolina Press (Chapel Hill, NC), 1993. To see these drawings as in some way complementary to the poems, as some will doubtless try to, seems to me off-beam. Plath did once tell the BBC: "I have a visual imagination." But what's so striking about these drawings is exactly their difference from the visual world of the poems. These are pictures that revel in the thinginess of things: in wine bottles, an old kettle, a pair of shoes, the uneven timbering of beached boats, the architectural curlicues of a Parisian roof. It covers the period from straight after their honeymoon, right through to their final year in Devon, and is described by Heaton as an “intimate, domestic photo album”. New York Times, October 9, 1979; November 9, 2000, Martin Arnold, "Sylvia Plath, Forever an Icon," p. E3.

The Journals of Sylvia Plath, edited by Ted Hughes and Frances McCullough, Ballantine (New York, NY), 1983.The exhibition features a carefully selected array of images and objects from the Plath archives at Smith College and Indiana University's Lilly Library, two collections that have never been brought together before in a museum exhibition. Dorothy Moss, curator of painting and sculpture at the Portrait Gallery, is curator of this show, joined by guest co-curator Karen Kukil, associate curator of rare books and manuscripts at Smith College. Los Angeles Times, March 25, 2000, Marjorie Miller, "Sylvia Plath's Uncensored Journals, to Be Published in April, Shed Light on Her Dark Moods and Tumultuous Marriage," p. A2. There is a dangerous fallacy — a biological falsehood, a feebleness of empathy, an ethical failing — in the view that people who die by suicide after living with mental illness have somehow failed at life. It is one thing to feel deeply the tragedy of that loss, to rue the help not available to them in their time of struggle; it is quite another to fault the faulty instrument itself. It is impossible for any one consciousness to truly know what living inside another is like in the first place — we make art and poems and songs to try to show each other what it is like to be alive in this body-mind. But it is especially unfathomable for a mind coursing with fairly ordinary biochemistry, housed in a brain with fairy ordinary neurophysiology, to grasp what it might be like to live with a mind inflamed by ceaselessly misfiring neurotransmitters or a mind housed in a brain with a large tumor pressing against the amygdala at every moment of every hour. To survive even a single day with such a mind is no small feat. To have not only survived thirty-one years, as Sylvia Plath did, but to have filled those years with works of staggering beauty, with poems that irradiate generations of lives — that is a rare triumph of the spirit. One of Sylvia Plath’s little-known paintings. Perloff, Marjorie, Poetic License: Essays on Modernist and Postmodernist Lyric, Northwestern University Press (Evanston, IL), 1990. Contemporary Literary Criticism, Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 1, 1973; Volume 2, 1974; Volume 3, 1975; Volume 5, 1976; Volume 9, 1978; Volume 11, 1979; Volume 14, 1980; Volume 17, 1981; Volume 50, 1988; Volume 51, 1989.

I’ve discovered my deepest source of inspiration, which is art: the art of the primitives like Henri Rousseau, Gauguin, Paul Klee, and De Chirico. I have got out piles of wonderful books from the Art Library (suggested by this fine Modern Art Course I’m auditing each week) and am overflowing with ideas and inspirations, as I’ve been bottling up a geyser for a year. Broe, Mary Lynn, Protean Poetic: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath, University of Missouri Press (Columbia, MO), 1980. Throughout her life Plath cited art as her deepest source of inspiration; yet while her writing is celebrated around the world, her drawings are little known. This publication brings together drawings from 1955 to 1957, the period she spent on a Fulbright fellowship at Newnham College, Cambridge. During this time she met and married in secret the poet Ted Hughes, travelling with him on honeymoon to Paris and Spain before their return to the US in June 1957. In a letter to Hughes she penned one Sunday morning in October of 1956, twenty-four-year-old Plath traces her initial toe-dipping in art:We’ve previously featured some of Plath’s drawings and self-portraits here, but the Smithsonian exhibit offers a considerably richer selection than has been available online. The ink and gouache portrait at the top, for example, seems to draw from Marc Chagall in its materials and swirling lines and colors. It also recalls language in a diary entry from 1953: