Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard. Une anthologie réunie par Pascal Dethurens. [Writing on painting. From Diderot to Quignard. Anthology curated by Pascal Dethurens]. Part One

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Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard.
Une anthologie réunie par Pascal Dethurens.
[Writing on painting. From Diderot to Quignard. Anthology curated by Pascal Dethurens]

Paris, Citadelles et Mazenod, 2015, 496 pages

Review by Francesco Mazzaferro. Part One

[Original Version: June 2017 - New Version: April 2019]

Fig. 1) Cover page of the 2015 edition of Écrire la peinture, the anthology curated by Pascal Dethurens

The joy of a pleasant reading. This is the feeling that caught me from the first to the last page of Écrire la peinture, a formidable anthology by Pascal Dethurens on writings about art, and more specifically about those describing paintings. The volume was conceived for a well-defined linguistic area: the French one. In fact, the author presented more than sixty authors and 200 pieces of French literature, and yet one must wonder why a work of this quality has not yet been translated outside France. Moreover, a very pleasant volume, both for its large size (26 x 31 cm) as well as for a great iconographic apparatus, with 350 colour, often double-sided illustrations.

The choice of the title hides an implicit message: Écrire la peinture, with an infinite and transitive verb, can be verbatim translated as "To write painting" or "Writing painting". In English, we translated nevertheless "Writing on painting", to avoid any linguistic oddity. In French, the most usual title would be Écrire sur la peinture (Writing on painting) or Écrits sur la peinture (Writings on painting). Instead, Dethurens preferred the transitive form of the verb écrire, because he wanted to express the idea that a man of letters can indeed 'write a painting' and thus produce it through linguistic tools. A writer is therefore also capable of doing what a painter can do.

The Parisian publisher Citadelles et Mazenod released the first edition of the anthology in 2009 [1] (I read the second edition, partially revised, dated 2015 [2]). For each author, Dethurens wrote a short critical text putting the theme of painting at the centre of the analysis of his literature production; it followed the authors' quotes, always accompanied by a picture of the painting, which the texts referred to. The success of the book clearly suggested the publisher to extend the same formula to other fields, creating a full collection of specialised literary anthologies, always vast and richly illustrated. Two years later, in 2011, Citadelles et Mazenod brought to the market Écrire la sculpture by Sophie Mouquin and Claire Barbillon [3]. In 2014 it was the turn of Écrire le Voyage, edited by Sylvain Venayre [4]. Daniel Bergez curated in 2015 the anthology Écrire l'amour [5]. To date the latest volume of the series is Écrire la mythologie, edited by Emmanuelle Hénin, released in 2016, but I guess there will be others. In the French world, in sum, literary anthologies are still a privileged instrument to learn more about some given aspects of knowledge; they do not simply document the evolution of novel and poetry, but also offer a tool to understand other cultural spheres.

Pascal Dethurens, professor of comparative literature at the University of Strasbourg, has been studying the role of literature as a tool for transmitting culture over the last twenty years. Among his essays it is worth recalling Écriture et culture. Écrivains et philosophes face à l'Europe (1918-1950) [6] released in 1997, Musique et litérature au XXè siècle [7] dated 1998, De l'Europe en littérature. Création littéraire et culture européenne au temps de la crise de l'esprit (1918-1939) [8] finalised in 2002, and last but not least the volume Peinture et Littérature au XXe siècle [9] published in 2007.

Fig. 2) The essay by Pascal Dethurens 'Painting and Literature in the XX Century', published in 2007

A French Cultural Exception: Literature and Artistic Taste

What I will try to do in these pages is to review Écrire la peinture as an anthology of art literature, reading Dethurens’ work in a perspective that, I am aware, is not necessarily his own. The author's attention is, in fact, all addressed to the writers, and painting is ‘only’ the object of their literary creation: in the next parts of this post I will try instead to concentrate my attention on the painters and their paintings, in order to understand how much the writing of poets and novelists not only contributed to their public fortune, but even shaped the way the public was looking at art. But, first of all, it is now necessary to clarify the relationship between literature and artistic taste in the French culture, the theme of these pages.

In fact, I think that – although this is a different perspective from the one of Dethurens – my endeavour is a legitimate attempt. How to explain otherwise his choice on the chronological scope of the anthology? Why did he limit it to the modern history of French literature, as from Diderot's essays on the Salons? In my view, he did not only aim with his anthology at dwelling on the broader themes of ekphrasis and ut pictura poiesis. Moreover, he did not only want to document the parallelism of creative processes in painting and literature (a theme which is indeed largely discussed in his introduction). In my view, Dethurens also reflected on how the community of poets and writers contributed to develop art criticism in France, shaping thereby the aesthetic taste of the public and the artists themselves. The real protagonist of the anthology (understood in an ideal sense) is the man of letters, who promotes art to the public of his own country and becomes the collective interpreter of aesthetic preferences across the society. To have an example, it is sufficient to refer to the brothers Edmond (1822-1896) and Jules de Goncourt (1830-1870), who played a key role both in literary production and art writing. The two did not only co-authored the famous Journal [10] and pioneered what in France is called from them "écriture artiste – artistic writing", or - as Dethurens wrote - a literary style "able to reproduce in all their complexity the feelings experienced in the strongest moments of a life of an aesthete" [11]. The de Goncourts also jointly produced L’Art du XVIII siècle, a series of critical essays written between 1859 and 1875, and then published in three volumes in 1881-1882, which influenced the style of making art criticism in France [12]. It is worth mentioning that the country's most important literary prize is still the Goncourt Prize, given to "the best imaginary prose work of the year", and assigned for the first time in 1903.

Fig. 3) Félix Nadar, Photographic portrait of Edmond (left) and Jules (right) de Goncourt, without date

Fig. 4) The first series of L' Art du XVIII siècle, by the de Goncourt brothers, published in 1881

It goes without saying that the study of the relations between literature and painting has a great tradition in France, consisting to date of an immense scholar production. Daniel Bergez tried in 2007 to take account of it [13]. I find it thought-provoking that his bibliographic selection included two recent publications with exactly the same title as this anthology, referring to acts of conferences on the same topic, held in 1991 and 2003. Evidently, the expression Écrire la peinture – with the transitive use of the verb, as explained at the beginning of this post – is a general concept, expressing a link between literature and painting which today’s French culture perceives collectively as fundamental to its own history. But this cannot be simply a transient perception of the last years. In this blog we already reviewed four French anthologies of art literature, authored by Paul Ratouis de Limay (1921), Florent Fels (1925), Pierre du Colombier (1946) and finally Paul Éluard (1952-1954). Although all four authors moved from different stylistic preferences and covered different periods, they always conceived their collections of writings as a literary dialogue between artists in broad terms and therefore among painters, poets and novelists. In fact, the very role of writing on art had a specific role in the French world in the course of the centuries, on the one hand requiring artists to be able to draft in an elegant way (they were called artistes écrivaines or peintres écrivains), and on the other hand entailing that literates would be able to see art with a critical eye. And indeed the contiguity between art and literature - based on a mastery of all instruments of language and rhetoric to write on art - was extraordinarily intense in France since the time of the Conferences of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, organized by Charles Le Brun in the second half of the XVII century [14].

Fig. 5) Charles Le Brun, The entrance of Alexander to Babylon, 1661−1665. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Instead, German-language anthologies on art literature had their origin in the Universities of Berlin and Vienna during the second half of the XIX century, and all reflected the different philosophical setting of their authors (positivism or idealism in its various manifestations). The differences between the French and German anthologies of art literature tended therefore to reflect the fact that French painters often sought a dialogue with poets and the German ones especially with philosophers. The art literature of the two countries offers us therefore different indications on the privileged carriers for the transmission of culture in the two cultural areas: literature in the French-speaking world, and philosophy in German.

Obviously there were many exceptions: Poussin was called peintre philosophe; the pre-Romantic literates Tieck and Wackenroder influenced all Germany art criticism in early XIX century; one hundred years later, Rilke wrote in Paris, in the first decade of the XX century, his Letters on Cézanne, posthumously published in 1952; in 1968, Siegfried Lenz narrated painting as the purest form of rebellion against social oppression in his novel German Lesson; the philosopher Jean-François Liotard elaborated his thesis on a subliminal economy starting from the works of his friend, the painter Jacques Monory, in the Seventies and Eighties. From the very beginning, there were also important connections between the French and German art communities: Diderot, for example, wrote his reports of the Salons exhibitions on behalf of the German friend Friedrich Melchior Grimm, publisher of the francophone magazine La Correspondance Littéraire, targeting German nobility also for commercial reasons, so as to encourage their purchases of paintings.

Fig. 6) Pascal Quignard, Sex and Terror, 1994

In his introduction, Dethurens himself listed works of contemporary French philosophers dedicated to artists and quoted in particular the writings of Michel Foucault (1926-1984) on Magritte [15], Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) on Atlan [16], Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961) on Cézanne [17], Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) on Bacon [18] and Michel Serres (1930-) on Carpaccio [19]. Finally, among the French literatures contained in his anthology there are some who clearly have a philosophical-literary approach: think of the last and most recent text quoted, the essay on "Sex and Terror" (Le Sexe et l'Effroi), a scholar study of the different iconography in Greek and Roman erotic art, published in 1994 by the contemporary novelist Pascal Quignard, a living writer and essayist (1948-) who won the Prix Goncourt in 2002 and is a man of great philosophical and musical erudition.

If, therefore, there were certainly also important French thinkers who reflected on art, the weight of the literate world in art discussions was however predominant. Dethurens argued that "literature offers itself as the best way to talk about painting” [20]. The reading of works by aesthetic scholars "is in fact not the best way to get closer to art, but instead to be most certainly cut off from its experience and reality. At least, writers should not blush for having dreamed a privileged access to art works, despite being reproached for being burdened with their own feelings, embarrassed by their sensitivity, or ultimately completely braced by their ignorance of art. And yet, it cannot be a case that the painters who were most frequently object of public discussion, sometimes obsessively (Ingres, Delacroix and Monet in the XIX century, Picasso, Matisse and Giacometti in the XX century), were mainly commented by writers: something like a secret kinship, an implicit filiation, was thus perceived as a natural bond between the universe of inventors of forms and those of the creators of fiction” [21].

The author of the anthology also wrote that "the history of art criticism seems to accurately accredit the idea (...) of a French exception” [22]. It materialized in the existence of regularly corresponding literates and artists, whose match "became mythical (...): Aragon and Matisse, Saint-John Perse and Braque, Valéry and Degas, Char and Stael, Bonnefoy and Giacometti. One can only be impressed by the number of writers who felt able to make statements on an art whose technique they sometimes did not know and which they did not practice” [23].

Baudelaire wrote in his Salon of 1846: "I sincerely believe that the best art criticism is the one that is fun and poetic: not the cold and algebraic one that, on the pretext of wanting to explain everything, neither knows hatred nor love, and it is voluntarily disregarding every kind of temperament: a beautiful picture is instead the nature reflected by an artist, and the interpretation of that picture must be the object of reflection of an intelligent and sensitive mind” [24]. Art and art criticism must therefore reflect a common quality: temperament. It is not by chance that Zola said that “a work of art is a corner of creation seen through a temperament” [25].

Literature and painting according to Dethurens

Fig. 7) A photo of Pascal Dethurens, 2017, @Les Dernières Nouvelles d'Alsace

Écrire la peinture covers the two hundred years separating the reports on the Salons by Denis Diderot (1713-1784), published between 1759 and 1781, and the just quoted essay Le Sexe et l'Effroi. And yet, in his introduction, Dethurens also wanted to create a link between the developments over these two hundred years and a by far more ancient and broader tradition of dialogue between literature and painting. The inside front cover provided a summary of the aims of the work:

"The first descriptions of artworks in literature date back to antiquity, with the Iliad and the Aeneid. From there it comes the term ekphrasis, used to describe a style exercise and a rhetorical challenge: to make visible what is not in front of the reader's eyes, to reproduce the undeniable beauty of artworks by the magic of the word.

Fig. 8) Francesco Furini, The two Muses, Painting and Poetry, first half of the XVII century. Source: https://www.uffizi.it/opere/pittura-e-poesia

At the time of the Renaissance, the two Muses, Art and Poetry, discover their elective affinities. Since then, poets and writers compete in audacity and inventiveness to account for paintings in their works. With Diderot, this genre acquires his nobility and enters the history of literature. Over the course of more than twenty years, between 1759 and 1781, he excels in commenting on the Salons of Painting at the Louvre, where Chardin, Greuze, Vernet and Fragonard are exhibited. In this way, a free, dynamic reference is established, without using half-words in value judgments, which can destroy painters or laureate them to full success. It is this freedom that will inspire the great moments of XIX century art criticism with Stendhal, Gautier, Baudelaire, Zola, Mirbeau... Their vibrant and high-level prose will play an important role in the reception of modern painters, such as the Impressionists (in particular Manet and Monet). In the XX century, the spheres of painting and literature intersect, or even merge. Painters and writers share the same sources of inspiration and defend the same aspirations for an aesthetic renewal. Here are the great pairs of "writers-artists": Proust-Monet, Apollinaire-Picasso, Breton-Ernst, Genet-Giacometti, Beckett-Van Velde, Leiris-Bacon... More than ever, in a very fertile creative emulation, the feather of the ones becomes the extension of the brush of others."

The introduction to the anthology is titled "Les poètes de Zeuxis". The obvious reference is to one of the founding myths of the idea of art as a true reproduction of nature: the context between the Greek painters Zeuxis and Parrhasius. Pliny the Elder narrated that Zeuxis painted grape grains so accurately to deceive even birds and Parrhasius, annoyed by all these animals surrounding him and seeking in vain to eat grapes, painted a false curtain on the grains that, this time, deceived not only animals but Zeuxis himself: the latter even tried to shake it off with his own hand, to free the image of the fruits. Thus, an ancient literary myth gave rise to a way of thinking about art that has lasted long time since and has come to us. "The original legend - Dethurnes wrote - is undoubtedly beautiful; it has nourished for centuries fantasy and questions. As a story, it gave birth to the faith in an idea of art that will be based on the verisimilitude between pictorial reproduction and his model. It also created the myth of the painter of genius, at the same time a demiurge and a thaumaturge, creator and magician, whose greatest dream is to sow confusion as if he could sprinkle glitters on the eyes of men to cuddle them with illusions. But this tale shows, above all, how ready men are to become spectators, thus participating in the prodigy and commenting the miracle. Images catch the eye the same way as they question the text: who will not be tempted to describe Zeuxis’ grapes so as to prolong their effect and perpetuate their memory? Once the grains have disappeared, or if they are anyhow invisible to those who are not there to admire them, at least the writing will keep their trace forever, making them to live in absentia out of that silent and radiant life which is typical of lost beings and erased things. The ancient apologue also contains an allegorical meaning: in the face of the emotions provoked by an artwork, nobody has the power to abstain from speaking. The writers are all the cumulative images of these gourmet birds, deceived by the beauty of the shapes and colours of the picture, and eager to grab the grains for their secret delight” [26].

Dethurens noted that the use by painters of references to literature (the ut pictura poiesis argument) had a twofold effect: first, it motivated the thesis of Renaissance artists, who claimed and obtained that the dignity of liberal art be attributed to painting; second, at that time, it offered a cultural basis to the multiplication of paintings of mythological inspiration alongside those of religious themes [27]. In the XVII century Charles Perrault (1628-1703) and Molière (1622-1673) celebrated in poetry the art of Charles le Brun (1619-1690) and Pierre Mignard (1612-1695) respectively. In the ode To the Glory of the Church of Val-de-Grâce [28] composed in 1669, Molière exalted the baroque architecture of the church designed by François Mansart (1598-1666), praised the qualities of the Roman school painter Mignard (his friend), described the latter’s fresco of the dome and its features in terms of composition and design, sang the praises of Rome and the role of the fresco and finally concluded by celebrating the role that Louis XIV and Colbert had for the promotion of art in Paris, urging the latter to continue his work. The poet thus set himself a higher purpose than merely describing images, and inaugurated a new poetics: writing on painting [29]. In stylistic terms, Dethurens explained, quoting the first verses of the ode: "the lexical hyperbole and the nobility of the Alexandrian metres are chosen to respond, on a stylistic and metric level, to the sumptuous character of the object of praise” [30].

Fig. 9) Pierre Mignard, Portrait of Jean-Baptiste Poquelin alias Molière, about 1658. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Fig. 10) François Mansart and others, Church of Val-de-Grâce, Paris, 1645-1667. Source: Wikimedia Commons

 

Fig. 11) Pierre Mignard, The Glory of the Blessed, Fresco of the dome of the church of Val-de-Grâce, Paris, 1663. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Moliere, La Gloire du Val-de-Grâce, 1669

Digne fruit de vingt ans de travaux somptueux, Auguste bâtiment, temple majestueux, Dont le dôme superbe, élevé dans la nue, Pare du grand Paris la magnifique vue, Et, parmi tant d'objets semés de toutes parts, Du voyageur surpris prend les premiers regards, Fais briller à jamais, dans ta noble richesse, La splendeur du saint voeu d'une grande Princesse, Et porte un témoignage à la postérité De sa magnificence et de sa piété …

O fruit worthy of twenty years of sumptuous work! O august building, majestic temple, Whose superb dome, elevated in the sky, Adorns the magnificent view of the great Paris And, among many objects scattered everywhere, Captures the first looks of the surprised traveller, Make shine forever, in your noble wealth, The splendour of the holy vow of a great princess, And bear witness to posterity Of her magnificence and her pity...

In 1700, aesthetic theory imposed itself both in literature and in poetry, taking a crucial role. Aesthetic thought was born in the German speaking world - with Lessing, Baumgarten, Winckelmann, Kant, Schiller and many others. Contemporaneously, the Louvre Salons multiplied the opportunities of drafting descriptive accounts of the works that were presented to the public for the first time. These exhibitions were held every two years under the patronage of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, with the aim of strengthening an independent French school and offering artists opportunities to exhibit and sell their works. Dethurens points out, however, that - even when novelists and poets were describing the pictures - writing on painting always sets itself a literary goal that went beyond art criticism: even when a scholar of literature was presenting artworks to the readers, like Diderot did for twenty years, he was actually translating the language of visibility into one of readability, by implementing selective choices that "require a true effort of invention and, oblige the author to refine his sight, imposing a duty of creation” [31].

Fig. 12) Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Portrait of Denis Diderot, about 1769. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Thus, Diderot established a new intermediate genre between literary fiction and art criticism. "Grimm and Diderot quickly agreed that the philosopher, who had written in 1752 the article on «The Beautiful» in the Encyclopédie, would take the task of describing the paintings which were deserving his admiration to the prestigious subscribers [of La Correspondance Littéraire], i.e. the main court sovereigns [in Germany]. Everything had to happen as if they had been able to attend these Salons without being there: the ekphrasis, the art of presence in absence, required readers a little imagination and their author the genius of fiction. And so it was born, not at the margin of a writer's work, but at the heart of his production and reflection, a literary genre. (...) Accepting the challenge, Diderot opened an era of (French at first, and later one European) literature that over two hundred years has not ceased to get richer and richer" [32].

Fig. 13) Henri Fantin-Latour, Tribute to Delacroix, 1864. From left to right, sitting: Louis Edmond Duranty, Henri Fantin-Latour, Jules Champfleury, Charles Baudelaire. Standing: Louis Cordier, Alphonse Legros, James Whistler, Édouard Manet, Felix Bracquemond, Albert de Balleroy. In the centre, a self-portrait of Eugène Delacroix. Source: Wikimedia Commons

An intermediate genre, it was said: and yet Dethurens himself cited the anthology "Écrire sur la peinture” [33] by Charlotte Maurisson and Agnès Verlet, to note that, starting with Diderot, men of letters were no longer engaged in describing imaginary paintings, but - devoting themselves to real artworks and in most cases to new creations by contemporary artists - ended up giving an impetus to art criticism. And he observed - in line with Walter Benjamin [34] - that, in the absence of mass-reproducing instruments, writing had remained for decades the privileged tool for making art known to the public, offering writers ample space to join the camp of art criticism [35]. The next step was with Stendhal (1783-1842) and above all with Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867). With Baudelaire "the writer's figure and the role of the art critic are merged into one single writer (...). What he teaches is that the discourse on the arts always involves a poetic: a theory of poetry such as rhythm, figure and image" [36]. The example of Baudelaire was followed by Théophile Gautier (1811-1872), Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848-1907) and Octave Mirbeau (1849-1917), the aforementioned brothers Goncourt and Émile Zola (1840-1902). On the other hand, art descriptions of other great figures of literature such as Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850), Victor Hugo (1802-1885) and Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880) were more episodic.

Fig. 14) Édouard Manet, Portrait of Émile Zola, 1868. Source: Wikimedia Commons

The XX century emphasized these motives, leading to the "triumph of high-quality writings by literates on painting. (...) All great writers of the XX century delivered us, except for some notorious exceptions, a whole series of descriptions of paintings” [37]. On the trail of Baudelaire (and therefore in the tradition of writers or poets who made important incursions in art criticism) Dethurens listed the names of Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918), Paul Valéry (1871-1945), Marcel Proust (1871-1922) , André Suarès (1868-1948), André Breton (1896-1966), Louis Aragon (1897-1982), Paul Éluard (1895-1952), Pierre Reverdy (1889-1960), Antonin Artaud (1896-1948), Paul Claudel (1868-1955) and Blaise Cendrars (1887-1961) for the first part of the century, as well as Saint-John Perse (1887-1975), René Char (1907-1988), Georges Bataille (1897-1962), Roger Caillois (1909-1989), Michel Leiris (1901-1990), André Malraux (1901-1976), Philippe Jaccottet (1925), Henri Michaux (1899-1984), Francis Ponge (1899-1988), Jacques Dupin (1927-2012) and Yves Bonnefoy (1923-2016) for the second [38].

Literature and avant-garde art

We also owe to the work of the French writers and poets who proved to be committed to art criticism - in some cases as a full-time job – if contemporary art experienced an extraordinary success in France in the XIX and XX centuries.

Fig. 15) Constantin Guys, Young Spanish Lady, not dated. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Fig. 16) Odilon Redon, Flowing Clouds, circa 1903. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Dethurens wrote: "Certainly, Baudelaire has sometimes mistaken himself about his time, showing cases of lack of clairvoyance in artistic prophecy. For example, he wrongly foresaw that Constantin Guys [note of the editor: he considered him as the emblem of the painter of the modern age] would experience a great posthumous success. And certainly Rimbaud, as well as Lautréamont, did not share the charm of the poets for painting. But impressionist painters like Manet, Monet, Sisley and Pissarro owed an enormous reconnaissance debt, since the Second Empire, to authors like Mirbeau and Zola. Likewise, a little later, Odilon Redon has a considerable debt of gratitude to Huysmans. The phenomenon got even greater in the years before the First World War and between the two wars, especially thanks to the tutorship of Apollinaire. That poet was not only acquainted with the great painters of his time but worked with some of them (like Dufy) and also wrote a lot on them, in numerous lyrics (for example, on Delaunay or Chagall), in his critics of the Salons exhibitions (consecrated to De Chirico, Gris and Picasso, but also to Marquet, Vlaminck and Matisse) and in exhibition catalogues. As for the era of surrealism, it is simply impossible to remember surrealist poets without simultaneously evoking surrealist painters, as poets and painters gathered behind a single banner before the time of dissent. The entire XX century history only emphasized this fusion of the two arts, renewing the secular myth of the elective affinity between the Muses” [39].

Fig. 17) Henri Rousseau called Le Douanier, The Muse who inspires the Poet: portrait of the painter Marie Laurencin and the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, 1909. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Fig. 18) Guillaume Apollinaire, The murdered poet, with thirty-six lithographs by Raoul Dufy, 1926. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Such an intense relationship between literature and poetry was certainly due to eventually affect French art criticism itself. This is why Dethurens mentioned in the introduction some contemporary art critics. The historian of mediaeval art and art critic Roland Recht (1941-), working in Strasbourg like the author of the anthology, defined the notion of style "like the tight texture that joins the structure with the surface, but also the surface with the thought" and explained that "unlike Riegl's formalism or Panofsky's iconology ... we must look for useful insights on the side of poetry." In doing so, Recht was inspired by the ideas of Paul Valéry and Yves Bonnefoy, and therefore of poets who have been intensely confronted with art criticism [40]. Dethurens also recalled that Daniel Arasse (1944- 2003), a historian of Renaissance art, resumed the doctrine of the aforementioned philosopher Merleau-Ponty on "painting as non-verbal thought" and theorized the implicit existence in every work of art of a text without words that corresponds to the verbal text of a literary work. In short, Dethurens meant that, in the French world, not only there has always been and there is still room for further dialogue between literature and poetry, but that even some art critics are nowadays inclined to incorporate that relationship within their own cognitive instruments.

End of Part One
Go to Part Two 

NOTES

[1] Dethurens, Pascal - Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Sollers, Paris, Citadelles et Mazenod, 2009, 496 pages.

[2] Dethurens, Pascal - Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard, Paris, Citadelles et Mazenod, 2015, 496 pages.

[3] Sophie Mouquin et Claire Barbillon, Écrire la sculpture. De l'Antiquité à Louise Bourgeois, Paris, Citadelles et Mazenod, 2011, 512 pages.

[4] Sylvain Venayre, Écrire le Voyage. De Montaigne à Le Clézio, Paris, Citadelles et Mazenod, 2014, 495 pages.

[5] Daniel Bergez, Écrire l'amour. De l'Antiquité à Marguerite Duras, Paris, Citadelles et Mazenod, 2015, 511 pages.

[6] Dethurens, Pascal - Écriture et culture. Écrivains et philosophes face à l'Europe (1918-1950), Paris and Geneva, H. Champion, 481 pages.

[7] Dethurens, Pascal - Musique et littérature au XXe siècle: actes du colloque des 28 et 29 mai 1997, Centre de recherche en littérature générale et comparée, Université des sciences humaines de Strasbourg, Strasbourg, Presses Universitaires de Strasbourg, 1998, 232 pages.

[8] Dethurens, Pascal - De l'Europe en littérature. Création littéraire et culture européenne au temps de la crise de l'esprit (1918-1939), Geneva, Droz, 2002, 488 pages.

[9] Dethurens, Pascal - Peinture et Littérature au XXe siècle, Strasbourg, Presses Universitaires de Strasbourg, 2007, 480 pages.

[10] De Goncourt, Edmond; de Goncourt, Jules - Journal des Goncourt: mémoires de la vie littéraire, Paris, E. Fasquelle, 1891-1907.

[11] Dethurens, Pascal - Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard, (quoted) …. p. 132.

[12] The three volumes are available at

 http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k6526174g (First volume: Watteau, Chardin, La Tour, Boucher), 

http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k6526225b?rk=64378;0 (Second volume: Greuze, Les Saint-Aubin, Gravelot, Cochin) and

http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k65261873?rk=42918;4 (Third volume: Eisen, Moreau, Ducourt, Fragonard and Prudhon).

[13] See: https://www.europe-revue.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/litt.-peinture-r-.pdf.

[14] Jouin, Henry - Conférences de l'Académie royale de peinture et sculpture, recueillies, annotées et précédées d'une étude sur les artistes écrivain, Paris, Quantin, 1883, 552 pages. The text is available in the internet. 

See: https://archive.org/details/confrencesdela00acaduoft.

[15] Foucault, Michel - Ceci n'est par une pipe: deux lettres et quatre dessins de René Magritte, Montpellier, Fata Morgana, 1973, 91 pages.

[16] Derrida Jacques, Atlan grand format. De la couleur à la lettre, Paris, Gallimard, 2001, 158 pages.

[17] Merleau-Ponty, Maurice - L'oeil et l'esprit, Paris, Gallimard, 1964, 92 pages.

[18] Deleuze, Gilles - Francis Bacon: logique de la sensation, Paris, Editions de La différence, 1981, 112 pages

[19] Serres, Michel - Esthétiques sur Carpaccio, Paris, Hermann, 1975, 159 pages.

[20] Dethurens, Pascal - Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard, (quoted) …. p. 18.

[21] Dethurens, Pascal - Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard, (quoted) …. p. 19.

[22] Dethurens, Pascal - Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard, (quoted) …. p. 19.

[23] Dethurens, Pascal - Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard, (quoted) …. pp. 19-20.

[24] Dethurens, Pascal - Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard, (quoted) …. p. 20.

[25] Zola, Emile - Mes haines : causeries littéraires et artistiques; Mon salon; Manet, Parigi, Charpentier, 1893. Quotation at page 25. See: https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Page:Emile_Zola,_Mes_haines_-_Mon_salon_-_Edouard_Manet,_Ed._Charpentier,_1893.djvu/35.

[26] Dethurens, Pascal - Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard, (quoted) …. p. 7.

[27] Dethurens, Pascal - Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard, (quoted) …. p. 9.

[28] The integral text in French is available at the internet address: 

https://books.google.de/books?id=tm5BAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA419&lpg=PA419&dq=Digne+fruit+de+vingt+ans+de+travaux+somptueux&source=bl&ots=FxXLwSiB3Z&sig=YXBQVzOEn1RTXLWb0SH33UoVhsQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjD8_eZob7UAhVHJVAKHcpqBjcQ6AEIQzAF#v=onepage&q=Digne%20fruit%20de%20vingt%20ans%20de%20travaux%20somptueux&f=false

[29] Dethurens, Pascal - Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard, (quoted) …. p. 9.

[30] Dethurens, Pascal - Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard, (quoted) …. p. 9.

[31] Dethurens, Pascal - Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard, (quoted) …. p. 10.

[32] Dethurens, Pascal - Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard, (quoted) …. p. 12.

[33] Maurisson, Charlotte - Écrire sur la peinture: anthologie et dossier, lecture d'images par Agnès Verlet, Gallimard, 2006, 240 pages.

[34] Benjamin, Walter - Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit (The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction), published in German in Paris 1936.

[35] Dethurens, Pascal - Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard, (quoted) …. p. 15.

[36] Dethurens, Pascal - Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard, (quoted) …. p. 15.

[37] Dethurens, Pascal - Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard, (quoted) …. p. 15.

[38] Dethurens, Pascal - Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard, (quoted) …. p. 15.

[39] Dethurens, Pascal - Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard, (quoted) …. pp. 16-17.

[40] Dethurens, Pascal - Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard, (quoted) …. p. 17.