Tennessee Williams was already a famous playwright, known for “A Streetcar Named Desire’’ and “The Glass Menagerie,’’ when he bought a small home in Key West, picked up a brush and began to explore a new form of artistic expression: painting.
Some of those paintings — poignant pieces in tropical colors that are striking for their depictions of Williams’ loneliness — are now on exhibit in Miami Beach at the Jewish Museum of Florida-FIU.
“These beautiful paintings tell a different story about one of literature’s greatest writer’s personal and innermost feelings, as expressed through an artistic medium that Tennessee Williams loved but that most of us did not know about — his painting,’’ said Susan Gladstone, executive director of the museum.