Portrait photograph.
(Moore, Marianne) Lynes, George Platt. Portrait Photograph. New York: 1950.
Vintage gelatin silver print; 7 ½ x 9 1/8 inches; inscribed in ink both recto and verso; Lynes studio stamp on verso; several strips of tape along extreme edges, with two small areas of adhesive residue in bottom margin; autograph number in blue ink bottom left corner (IIB).
A presentation print, charmingly inscribed twice by Moore, on both recto and verso, to Columbia Records executive Goddard Lieberson:
Recto: For Mr. Goddard Lieberson / from Marianne Moore – / diffidently on the back of the picture, or emphatically “on the face” of it, a grateful beneficiary of his pedagogy, kindness, and extraordinary forbearance. / February, 1950.
Verso: For Columbia Records, Inc. and Mr. G. Lieberson in particular / from Marianne Moore / February 1950 / (at the not over-enthusiastic suggestion, I hope? of Lloyd Frankenberg).
Moore presented this to Lieberson following the production and release of Pleasure Dome, a Columbia LP recording that featured eight prominent modernist poets reading from their own work: T.S. Eliot, e.e. cummings, William Carlos Williams, Ogden Nash, W.H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, Elizabeth Bishop, and Moore. Lieberson, an executive of Columbia at the time (he would become president), was responsible for both the company’s introduction of the long-playing (LP) record and its innovative employment of the technology for extended audio projects such as Broadway cast recordings and spoken word anthologies. The album was edited by Lloyd Frankenberg, who also wrote the liner notes.
Moore (1887–1972) had been an integral member of Modernist poetry circles since her first publication
in 1915, and contributed regularly to The Nation, The New Republic, and Partisan Review, among others. From 1925 until 1929, Moore served as editor of the influential literary journal The Dial, and in 1933
she was awarded the Helen Haire Levinson Prize by Poetry Magazine. An avid letter writer, Moore corresponded often with contemporaries Pound, Williams, Eliot, and Wallace Stevens, and later, such promising younger poets as Bishop, Allen Ginsberg, John Ashbery, and James Merrill. She is perhaps best known for her 1951 book, Collected Poems—which received the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the Bollingen Prize—and for her 1967 compendium The Complete Poems, in which Moore revised a large number of her early verses.
American photographer George Platt Lynes (1907–1955) was initially known for his fashion work in Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue, and later for his portraits of members of the film and artistic communities, including Katharine Hepburn, Gloria Swanson, Orson Welles, Aldous Huxley, Thomas Mann, and Moore. While usually pictured in what became her signature outfit – a black cape and tricorn hat – Moore chose here to have Lynes capture her instead wearing a more commonplace wool overcoat with
a crepe-trimmed straw hat.
(#4656748)
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