Creative Writing and Art History

Creative Writing and Art History considers the ways in which the writing of art history intersects with creative writing. Essays range from the analysis of historical examples of art historical writing that have a creative element to examinations of contemporary modes of creative writing about art.

• Considers the ways in which the writing of art history intersects with creative writing
• Covers a diverse subject matter, from late Neolithic stone circles to the writing of a sentence by Flaubert
• The collection both contains essays that survey the topic as well as more specialist articles
• Brings together specialist contributors from both sides of the Atlantic

6 Notes on Contributors

8 Chapter 1 'A narrative of what wishes what it wishes it to be': An Introduction to 'Creative Writing and Art History'
Catherine Grant

22 Chapter 2 Writing Perceptions: The Matter of Words and the Rollright Stones
Nicholas Chare

46 Chapter 3 (Blind Summit) Art Writing, Narrative, Middle Voice
Gavin Parkinson

66 Chapter 4 Connoisseurship, Painting, and Personhood
Jeremy Melius

88 Chapter 5 Under the Hat of the Art Historian: Panofsky, Berenson, Warburg
Francesco Ventrella

110 Chapter 6 'The Liar': Fictions of the Person
Patricia Rubin

130 Chapter 7 'Scattered notes': Authorship and Originality in Paul Gauguin's Diverses choses
Linda Goddard

148 Chapter 8 'Sudden gleams of (f)light': 'Intuition as Method'?
Charlotte de Mille

166 Chapter 9 Rotten Sun
C. F. B. Miller

190 Chapter 10 Notes on Writing as Vertigo
Satish Padiyar

201 Index

Catherine Grant is Lecturer in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London. She co-ordinated the Writing Art History project at the Courtauld Institute of Art with Patricia Rubin and is the co-editor (with Lori Waxman) of Girls! Girls! Girls! in Contemporary Art (2011).

Patricia Rubin is Judy and Michael Steinhardt Director of the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. She is a member of the International Advisory Board of Art History and the author of Giorgio Vasari: Art and History (1995),Renaissance Florence: The Art of the 1470s (1999), and Images and Identity in Fifteenth-Century Florence (2007), and co-author of Renaissance Florence: The Art of the 1470s (1999).

This collection of articles considers the ways in which the writing of art history intersects with creative writing, from the creative writing of art history to dialogues between styles of creative and art-historical writing. The subject matter covered is diverse, from late Neolithic stone circles to the writing of a sentence by Flaubert. Yet a number of questions circulate – in particular, the stakes involved in various forms of art-historical writing, and the claims made for the art historian’s interpretation. Some authors analyse historical examples of art-historical writing that have a creative element, others explore conversations between literature and art history, whilst others attempt their own modes of creative writing about art. The topics covered within this varied collection include Paul Gauguin’s collages of quotations, Sophie Calle’s collaboration with Paul Auster, Henry James’ portraiture, Bernard Berenson’s fictional artist ‘Amico di Sandro’, Virginia Woolf’s ‘visual’ writing, Pablo Picasso’s solar mythology as re-written by Georges Bataille, and creative writing in the ‘middle voice’.