Unseen Sylvia Plath drawings to go on show at London gallery
25 October, 2011
by: Spoonfed Arts Team
Beautiful drawings of everyday objects by one of the twentieth century's most famous poets.
Exciting news for fans of Sylvia Plath: a London gallery has just announced that they'll be exhibiting a host of drawings by the troubled poet this winter. The group of 44 works – which has never previously been exhibited in the UK – is to go on show from November at The Mayor Gallery on Cork Street.
Sylvia Plath is one of the great figures of twentieth century literature – not only for her poetry and writings, but also for her life, death and marriage to Ted Hughes. Since tragically taking her own life by carbon monoxide poisoning in 1963 at the age of 30, Plath has reached near-mythological status, as a pioneer of the kind of brutally frank, confessional style that came to influence a generation of writers and artists.
Perhaps surprisingly, Plath's drawings show little of the inner turmoil for which she is best known. The works are delicate, precise pen and ink drawings, that depict a range of everyday objects – a pile of pots, a bowl of fruit, an umbrella, a cow, a thistle. But of course it's impossible to disengage from biography, and visitors are bound to read a lot into these disarming drawings – in particular, one depiction of two low-heeled shoes, titled in Plath's own hand, 'The Bell Jar'.
The works are owned by Plath's daughter, Frieda Hughes, who famously lambasted the 2003 film, Sylvia, which starred Gwyneth Paltrow as Sylvia. She also criticised those who saw it as "the peanut eaters, entertained...Each carrying their memory of her, Lifeless - a souvenir." Given that the Mayor Gallery is a commercial gallery, one assumes that these drawings by Plath are for sale, as a slightly different kind of souvenir.
They are to be shown alongside another highly mythologised female artist – Dadamaino, about whom, in contrast to Plath, very little biographical information is known at all.
Sylvia Plath and Dadamaino is at The Mayor Gallery from 2nd November to 17th December 2011.
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Image: Sylvia Plath - The Bell Jar. Copyright Frieda Hughes.
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