Description

Everyone knows cigarettes are unhealthy, but they are still powerful symbols of both sophistication and intelligence. The African American painter Beauford Delaney made this pastel drawing of his friend, the poet May Swenson, in 1960. Even though everyone, it seems, smoked back then, the addition of the cigarette also enhances the edginess of the portrait. Just as Delaney was a realist painter in an age of abstraction, Swenson was interested in conveying depth through an intense evocation of the surface of things, a goal similar to Elizabeth Bishop’s. Swenson wrote that she desired "to get through the curtain of things as they appear, to things as they are, and then into the larger, wilder space of things as they are becoming." A westerner, born in Utah to a family that spoke Swedish at home (she had translated the poems of Tomas Tranströmer into English), Swenson became especially well known for her landscape poems and love poems.

Record Contributed By

National Portrait Gallery

Record Harvested From

Smithsonian Institution