allegorist

In an interview that Baldwin gave with Quincy Troupe toward the end of his life, he said that Toni was an allegorist, but that’s not really true.

Fussell writes of her first encounter with Fisher’s work in the 1960s as she was about to embark her own career: “That she could write so wittily, learnedly, and sexily about a subject as base as food shocked my Puritan upbringing and threatened my literary snobbery. But as I gobbled up her pages, I saw that food was merely the ruse of this libidinous oyster-eater, wolf-killer, gastronomical storyteller, kitchen allegorist, American humorist, metaphysical wit. She was an American original and a writer of the first order.”

He was primarily an allegorist who folded mythic figures into otherworldly visions of pagan religiosity.

Erró, the Icelandic painter who has been friends with Mr. Rosenquist since the two met in New York in the early 1960s, would instead be a late-medieval religious allegorist.

As an allegorist, Birk is at once simplistic and uncannily insightful.