Marianne Moore and Chinese Aesthetics

Chinese culture held a well-known fascination for the leading American modernist Marianne Moore. What remains unknown but is made fully clear here is how she drew on Daoist a esthetic in search for a modernist style. It was Chinese animal paintings that inspired her to defy the Western tradition and write about animals "as seriously as Rembrandt painted a portrait of a man." Her "Nine Nectarines" is a superb example of modernist effort to "make it new," using Chinese subjects and imitating Chinese imagination.