Chapter 37 - Visual Arts and Exhibitions

Summary

The writings of W. G. Sebald have inspired visual artists, who have found kinship with him through a wide variety of shared common themes. Sebald himself undoubtedly emboldened such a vibrant response from visual artists, first by imaginatively using photographs and other images as an integral part of his own books and then by collaborating with living artists in the making of two books of his poetry late in his life. Visual artists could relate to the places that he wrote about, especially the landscape and ecology of adopted home of East Anglia. Other themes that artists frequently felt they had in common with Sebald included exile, memory, trauma, the archive, history, war, colonialism. As more and more artists came to use Sebald’s writings as a jumping off point for their own work, curators began to respond by organizing major exhibitions of such work for important museums in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Europe.