Enhanced meaning through layered experience, and other art tips from Dada

The Big Think has an appreciation of Peggy Samuels's new book Deep Skin: Elizabeth Bishop and Visual Art, which details the connections between the Modernist master's work and that of painters like Kurt Schwitters, Alexander Calder, and Paul Klee:

Thanks to college roommate and MoMA curator Margaret Miller, Bishop gained an insider’s access to the newest European artists to hit American shores. When Paul Klee’s art gained favor, Bishop recognized the power of his paintings’ surfaces as an unstable boundary. Works such as Glance of a Landscape (shown above), with its layers of transparent and opaque watercolor, provided a visual example of the multilayered reality Bishop wanted to create in her poetic worlds. Just as Klee places a bodiless eye in Glance of a Landscape, Bishop inserts an “eye/‘I’” in a similar “fluid deep space” in poems such as “Pleasure Seas,” Samuels writes. Much like Emerson’s “Transparent Eyeball,” Bishop’s Klee-esque eyeball breaks through the surface of reality like breaking through the surface of water, which becomes the threshold open both “to nature and to the interior of the poet” in Samuels’ view.