Throughout his lifetime, Robert Lowell was intrigued by or even obsessed with the visual arts. It was a preoccupation that started during his school days at St. Mark’s and lasted to the final poem of the last volume he published, “Epilogue,” his ode to painter Johannes Vermeer. This chapter investigates what this passion about especially painting reveals about his writing. Lowell admired and was envious of Old Master painters and sought to emulate their gaze at the world through language. He was more suspicious of photography and contemporary art, although he wrote amply about those art forms as well. By zooming in on Lowell’s creative process and his idiosyncratic revision process of two case studies – “Cranach’s Man-Hunt” and “Misanthrope and Painter” – it becomes apparent that Lowell used the visual arts to consider how he thought about his chosen art form and profession, and how he thought about the world.

Understanding contemporary African American literature, this chapter argues, requires accounting for the rich, multifaceted dialogue between Black literary production and the visual arts. This chapter traces what Toni Morrison called the “alliances and alignments” between literature and the other arts by analyzing the aesthetics and themes of contemporary African American writing and examining the cross-arts influences that shaped it. The dialogue between African American literature and visual culture is part of a much longer tradition, and contemporary writers have built on many earlier precedents. But this chapter also unpacks how important historical changes, including developments in media technology and the rise of Black art institutions, have generated new and more numerous intersections between Black literary and artistic cultures since the 1970s. Focusing on three key spaces that provided material support and thematic inspiration for Black writers’ experiments with visual art – the home, museum, and university – this chapter examines how authors working in a range of literary genres, including novels, poetry, plays, screenplays, memoirs, and essays, engaged with a variety of visual arts, including painting, film, sculpture, and photography. The influences and aesthetics of visual culture, the chapter shows, powerfully infuse the work of many writers today.

By the end of the nineteenth century, cakewalk and ragtime music had taken the world so much by storm that Europe’s major classical composers were composing ragtime and cakewalk inspired music. Both Igor Stravinsky and Claude Debussy sought to break from European classical traditions by investing in the African American vernacular forms that were introducing the Old World to New World rhythmic patterns and melodies. This interest in performance, nightlife, the circus, and café culture was shared by artists such as Pablo Picasso, Francis Picabia, Charles Demuth, and George Grosz, all of whom explored themes and aesthetics influenced by the confluence of African American performance culture and African art available in the Western cultural capitals of Paris, New York, and Berlin. By the time author F. Scott Fitzgerald dubbed the 1920s “the jazz age” in the United States, African American music had already been influencing the trajectory of visual culture in the United States for several decades. With its creative fluidity, investment in aesthetics, and ability to mine African diasporic cultures for its most innovative impulses, jazz has been poised to respond to visual culture’s search for new vocabularies of form.

The treaty processes examined so far are replete with nature photographs. To consider the significance of such images, Chapter 4 starts by explaining aesthetic theorisations of nature in visual art. Over philosophical objections, it maintains that artistic depictions of the environment can be understood both critically, for example with insights from eco-criticism, and in terms of the multi-sensory experiences contemplated by philosophers of environmental aesthetics. The chapter then describes conceptions of ‘image’ in aesthetic theory for the arts, and in the field of law and aesthetics or, more particularly, visual jurisprudence. Despite a privileging of worded text, law’s visual manifestations have been identified by jurisprudents of common and civil law. The aesthetic analysis of visual art for law by scholars such as Desmond Manderson is found in studies of art for international law, and for environmental law. This chapter argues that understandings of image in scholarship for the arts can be combined with the distinct characterisations of the environment by philosophers of environmental aesthetics, to analyse the concept of aesthetic value for international environmental law.

The most provocative legacy of surrealism in Latin America in the period following World War II can arguably be found in the work of women artists and writers. The postwar feminine surrealisms examined in this chapter responded to the encroachment of capitalism in daily life and the gradual, if incomplete, loosening of normative categories of sex and gender. Taking up historical surrealism’s focus on eros as an incomplete promise, they expanded into alternative configurations of sex, desire, and family life, while simultaneously emphasizing persistent, if updated, forms of gendered violence. This chapter analyzes experimental writers and visual artists from Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay from the mid-1940s to the mid-1960s – Grete Stern, Maria Martins, Marosa Di Giorgio, and Alejandra Pizarnik. It concludes by noting the legacies of their erotic surrealisms for contemporary art and literature.

The most provocative legacy of surrealism in Latin America in the period following World War II can arguably be found in the work of women artists and writers. The postwar feminine surrealisms examined in this chapter responded to the encroachment of capitalism in daily life and the gradual, if incomplete, loosening of normative categories of sex and gender. Taking up historical surrealism’s focus on eros as an incomplete promise, they expanded into alternative configurations of sex, desire, and family life, while simultaneously emphasizing persistent, if updated, forms of gendered violence. This chapter analyzes experimental writers and visual artists from Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay from the mid-1940s to the mid-1960s – Grete Stern, Maria Martins, Marosa Di Giorgio, and Alejandra Pizarnik. It concludes by noting the legacies of their erotic surrealisms for contemporary art and literature.

This chapter examines the relationship between literature and visual cultures between 1900 and 1920 through the different forms of art writing practised by a range of literary and cultural figures. Museums and art galleries witnessed a surge in popularity during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as collections expanded and opened up to a wider viewing public, while exhibitions such as the post-impressionist exhibition of 1910 have come to be seen as cultural landmarks in narratives of the period. This essay explores writers’ encounters with artworks and artefacts in the contested yet stimulating spaces of museums and galleries, and examines the ways in which such encounters helped to frame questions about aesthetics and cultural identity, history and the contemporaneous. It takes in the role of periodical cultures – focusing on Rhythm (1911–13), Blast (1914–15), and Colour Magazine (1914–32) – in mediating responses to visual art and as sites in which the demarcations between word and image could be redefined.

This chapter examines Ellison’s interest in visual art from his college days at Tuskegee Institute to the end of his career. By tracing Ellison’s evolving interest in visual media ranging from sculpture to painting to photography, I demonstrate his consistent attention to visual art. Most importantly, I consider how Ellison’s attention to the world of the visual influences his narrative technique. From his early experiments with short stories and novellas to his work on Invisible Man, essays, and Three Days Before the Shooting. . ., Ellison’s engagement with visual art reflects his sophisticated experimentation with presenting black identity.

This essay provides an overview of Brecht’s engagement with photography. His early fascination with the medium developed, in the context of the burgeoning illustrated media landscape and the German “New Photography,” into theoretical reflections in dialogue with Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer. He also began to use photography, especially press photography, in his own work: as a source for the analysis of social behavior and a way of fixing Gestus. In due course he became more and more sensitive to the politics of representation and employed photography directly and innovatively in his own works, the Journal and the “photoepigrams” of War Primer.

This essay discusses a series of links connecting Caribbean literature and the visual arts, paying particular attention to shared conceptual, critical preoccupations and visual vocabularies, as well as rhetorical strategies and aesthetic across art forms. It traces important stages in the ongoing dialogue between literature and art, including the foundational role of interdisciplinary movements, journals, art spaces and collaborations among writers and artists.

This chapter examines the role of apocalyptic thought during the Renaissance, which was marked by both continuity with medieval apocalypticism and innovation. It includes consideration of its impact on sober humanist scholarship, fierce Reformation debates regarding the papacy, apocalyptic optimism associated with exploration and missionary expansion in the New World, and esoteric speculation about the figure of Enoch.

Ekphrasis is the poetic device of describing one type of art within another, best exemplified by the Homeric “Shield of Achilles.” Ekphrasis is seen as a special element of the epic genre which often has metapoetic meaning.

Chapter 2, Art and Justice in Times of Transition, sets out the theoretical framework for the book. By undertaking a close visual analysis and narrative investigation of one artwork – REwind by Gerhard Marx, Maja Marx and Philip Miller – that addresses the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, I unpack four ideas which make art exigent and meaningful to transitional justice, and vice versa. These ideas are about the circulation of political sentiment, the mediation of political agency, the invitation of political encounters, and the invention of political space.I argue that an account of transitional justice without aesthetic dimensions – especially art – is insufficient. Art plays an important role in animating and activating the narratives of individuals so that they take on collective importance. In so doing, the past can be shared so that a new political future can be imagined. Artistic production becomes a radical form of political participation in times of political transition. The chapter concludes with an afterword on power, ethics, and modes of display.

Chapter 9, The Art of Representation, explores the exhibition Imaginary Fact in the 2013 South Africa Pavilion at the International Art Biennale in Venice. Three key narratives about violence emerge from this exhibition: the unresolved violence of apartheid-era crimes; the structural violence of pervasive practices of discrimination; and, the physical violence which people continue to be subjected.I anaylse three artworks which epitomise each narrative: David Kolane’s The Journey, Sue Williamson’s For Thirty Years Next to His Heart, and Zanele Muholi’s Faces and Phases.I argue that these three narratives are important actions in South Africa’s transition because they warn against the repetition of violence, document the structures of violence, and expose continuing practices of violence in the ‘new’ South Africa.