Moon Forms

Born in Pittsburgh, Baziotes spent his formative years in Reading, Pennsylvania, where his family opened a restaurant, The Crystal, and later, after a devastating fire, a lunch counter and bakery. The artist worked in the early 1930s for J. M. Kase & Company in Reading, a factory specializing in stained glass, before moving to New York in 1933 to pursue a career in art.

This painting was among seventeen new paintings Baziotes presented at Kootz Gallery in New York in April, 1947. Poetry was important to Baziotes’ work in the 1940s. Baudelaire held a special position in Baziotes’ life and work. As a spiritual companion, Baudelaire’s poetry described experiences beyond conscious, everyday life, using evocative imagery and symbolism to create new sensations and states of mind. In Baudelaire’s prose poem, “Favors of the Moon,” the poet describes his moon-mad woman, which may have served, in part, as inspiration for Moon Forms:

You shall be queen of men who have green eyes and whose throats have clasped by night in my caresses; of those that love the sea, the vast tumultuous sea, formless and multiform water, the place where they are not, the women whom they know not, the ominous flowers that are like the censers of an unknown rite, the odors that trouble the will, and savage and voluptuous beasts that are the emblems of their folly. That is why dear spoilt child, I lie now at your feet, seeking to find you in the nurse of all the moonstruck of the world.