This is the academic introduction to my ekphrastic novel, Salut Modernistes! The Riviera Portfolio, which I completed as an honors candidate in Writing and Rhetoric at Hobart and William Smith Colleges.
Through the completion of my novel and honors project, Salut Modernistes! The Riviera Portfolio, I have written on many different works of art as I explain museum exhibitions, curatorial practices, and write on different movements throughout the period of Modern Art. In the contemporary era, it might be easier to simply include a photo or copy of a work of art in the text rather than write about it, but legal logistics impede this—often, with Modernist works that have families still living, a hefty royalty to a copyright must be paid to use this image.
This isn’t a new problem—leading art critic of the Victorian era John Ruskin also found it difficult to get art to the masses in the nineteenth century, when reproductions of works in color were often costly. Authors such as Ruskin and me (and a plethora of others throughout history) have employed ekphrasis, a description of a work of art used as a literary device, not just as a way to sidestep copyright laws but to use different kinds of storytelling that employs both a reader’s abstract construction of a narrative as well as a reader’s abstract construction of a visual scene. Ekphrasis is often my favorite part of my own writing, allowing me to construct a scene that will connect readers with all of their senses rather than just the visual.
I believe that due to the nature of her early work at the Sorbonne, literary theorist Louise M. Rosenblatt would have varied opinions on the different aspects of ekphrasis: its place in the act of aesthetic reading, the blurred boundaries of art disciplines that ekphrasis creates, how it affects the unique value of art disciplines as well as how ekphrasis aids in the creation of the poetic experience. Rosenblatt’s first book, L’Idée de l’art pour l’art dans la littérature anglaise is a study in the theories of art for art’s sake developed by English and French writers “to combat the pressures of an uncomprehending or hostile society,” (Rosenblatt xi), and it is here that we see the development of her ideas arguing for a nurturing, free environment within a reader for poets and other artists of the world.
Let me first begin with ekphrasis, starting in Homer’s Odyssey with the description of Achilles’ shield. Ekphrasis isn’t the mere description of the action in the painting, though that could certainly be part of it, but the imaginative act of narrating and reflecting on the “action” of a work of visual art. This takes the one-sided act of viewing a work of visual art and levels the experience with the literary event; in order to “view” the work through ekphrasis, an author makes a reader engage in the same mechanisms of abstract construction that a reader would have to enact in order to read a text. In the same way that a reader makes a text a poem or a work of literature, through an author’s use of ekphrasis, a reader makes a work of visual art into the same poetic event; classically, ekphrasis is employed by authors to consciously show the superiority of literary art to the visual, and I argue that while this point is debatable, a reader makes more of an emotional and psychological connection with a work of visual art when it is first experienced through an abstract literary construction.
Through the use of ekphrasis, authors force readers into an act of what Rosenblatt calls “aesthetic reading.” Whereas in her theory of efferent reading involves reading for a certain purpose, so that only the “residue”or purpose of the text remains, “aesthetic reading” concerns the reader during the actual reading event; a reader will engage all of his senses and “pay attention to the associations, feelings, attitudes, and ideas that these words and their referents arouse within him. Listening to himself, he synthesizes these elements into a meaningful structure…In aesthetic reading, the reader’s attention is centered directly on what he is living through during his relationship with that particular text” (25).
But what is the author’s purpose of engaging a reader in aesthetic reading? If an author could pay the royalty (or perhaps use for free an image of a work of visual art), what could be the benefits of using ekphrasis instead? In the case of John Ruskin, the purpose of using ekphrasis to defend painter J.M.W Turner’s works was to allow more people to be affected by the purpose and narrative of the painting than could physically be moved by its image, and to prove to readers that Turner’s work was the precipice for a major modern art movement. In the case of Ruskin, many fewer people could physically see a painting in a gallery or museum during the Victorian Era, and a reproduction in a book cannot convey the same narrative, action, or themes that the original work can, nor can it invoke the same emotions within a viewer. In order to make Turner’s message and depictions of subjects more widespread, ekphrasis was a logical way to spread the word and make art more public than its narrow bourgeois audience.
However, Ruskin used ekphrasis more creatively than just spreading the social themes of a work through text. Ruskin was the first author to use ekphrasis in a way that persuaded readers into believing in his imaginative understanding of a work of art. In his 1843 book Modern Painters, Ruskin defends Turner’s depiction of “truth” in his paintings against Neoclassical art critics who decried the paintings’ mimetic inaccuracies. In his lengthy defenses of Turner in Modern Painters, which would become a five-volume book completed in 1860, Ruskin used ekphrasis in order to elevate art criticism out of the Neoclassical age, aligning public opinion with contemporary Romantic painting by shifting viewer concern from the general truth to particular truth, a key component of Romantic thought.
Ruskin describes Turner’s Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying – Typhoon Coming On, also known as The Slave Ship (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) with rich imagery influenced by the descriptive writing of Sir Walter Scott, the blank verse of William Wordsworth, parallels with the King James Bible, and references to Shakespeare that enrich the narrative of the painting in a way that serves the literary reader more than the physical viewer of the painting. In his passages, Ruskin constructs a narrative beyond Turner’s painting, giving us a dramatic image charged full of emotion that is only experienced because of a reader’s full engagement in living through the text. In viewing a work of visual art, there is no equal to the aesthetic literary event.
This is because, unlike the text, a work of visual art exists without viewer’s necessary participation in order for it to become art. Rosenblatt writes that “the reader of a text…is, above all, a performer…the performer’s attention is absorbed in what he is producing as he plays. Once he stops playing, we are left only with the black and white score” (29), which shows that unlike a work of visual art, literature and poetry are can only be evoked by a reader; unlike a work of visual art, their aestheticism lies in the abstract construction of a mental image by a reader’s translation of the words, which ends as soon as a reader ceases the literary event. The aestheticism of a visual work of art lies in color, composition, and an artist’s masterful handling of formal elements; the aestheticism of a text does not exist until a reader translates an author’s attempt at formal composition. Rosenblatt writes that a reader of the literary work of art should aspire to “a complete absorption in the process of evoking a work from the text, a sensing, clarifying, structuring, savoring, of an experience as it unfolds” (29). The literary work of art has the unique ability to make a reader live through an entire sensual experience as if it were truly experienced, while the visual work of art cannot achieve this alone.
This is what Ruskin and others achieve through ekphrasis: while it is certainly useful as a device through which to share the message of visual art with the masses, ekphrasis has the ability to give readers an experience of living through the narrative of a work of visual art. Ekphrasis enriches a reader’s relationship with a work of visual art by giving him a “total lived-through experience” (29) that engages with all of the senses and gives him a psychological and emotional connection through his own construction of the work, which is impossible by appealing to the visual sense alone.