Marianne Moore (1887-1972)and her Mother
Poet
Marguerite Zorach, who fell under the spell of Cubism and Fauvism during four influential years in Paris (1908-1912), exhibited her boldly colored works at the notorious Armory Show in 1913, and was in the vanguard of the applied arts with her needlework and textile designs. Moore and Zorach first met in New York in 1915. In this portrait of her friend, Zorach records the poet at an important moment in her rise to fame. Observations had been published in 1924, she had just won the Dial award, and she was shortly to become that magazine's acting editor. She also notes Moore's complex relationship with her mother, with whom Moore lived until the latter's death in 1947.
Marguerite Zorach (1887-1968)
The recipient of virtually every major American literary award, Marianne Moore was acclaimed by such contemporaries as T. S. Eliot for the "original sensibility and alert intelligence" of her poetry. Moore's innovative, witty, and often ironic verse, composed of unconventional metrical schemes and concerned with such no-nonsense virtues as courage, loyalty, and patience, secured for her a leading position among modernist writers of the early twentieth century.
Oil on canvas, 1925
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution
NPG.87.217
Enlarged image
© 2002 Smithsonian Institution
