Tennessee Williams: a portrait of the playwright as a painter

When Tennessee Williams showed up early afternoons at David Wolkowsky's home near Key West, Florida, he would have three things to help get him to nightfall: "A bottle of red wine, Billie Holiday tapes and paint," his friend recalls.

Out of that concoction came paintings, dozens over 30 years, that the poet and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright gave to friends, lovers and neighbours. Now, 32 years after his death at the age 71 in 1983, his works have been collected for a show in New Orleans, one of his adopted homes. They provide insight into Williams' sensual dreamscape that he extracted through images of Christian crosses, water and flesh.

"There's a reason he didn't just take photographs, and there's a reason why he didn't write about these things," says William Andrews, executive director of the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, where "Tennessee Williams: The Playwright and the Painter" runs until May 31. "The act of painting is an intimate mirror. I think he liked the reflection he discovered in this work."

Williams first visited Key West in 1941, when he was on the verge of his most productive and acclaimed periods. Three years later, The Glass Menagerie would establish him as one of the most original, and poetic, voices on the American stage; more of his classic works quickly followed, most notably A Streetcar Named Desire, The Rose Tattoo and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

The success allowed Williams to buy a modest home in Key West which, until his death, would serve as playground and refuge. He lived there with his partner, Frank Merlo, but after Merlo died of lung cancer in 1963, Williams vanished into a fog of depression that he tempered with alcohol and prescription drugs.

Writing, however, never failed him, as attested by the voluminous body of plays, novels, poetry, short stories, screenplays and teleplays he left behind. But painting was largely seen by Williams' Key West friends as an outlet that was more personal and that offered true creative freedom. He rarely sold his works: some were discarded the day they were completed, and others were given to those in his inner circle.