In the art museum on the Wellesley College campus, there’s a painting by Paul Cezanne that I’d like to tell you about, titled “Portrait Romantique.” It’s 19 ½ by 17 ½ inches, from early in his career, sometime in 1868-70. Like everything he painted, it rewards careful study, an approach similar to the close reading we bring to literary works.
In 1920, the Swiss artist and all around maniac of wandering lines, Paul Klee, painted a work that came to be known as the Angelus Novus. I’ll tell you a somewhat shameful story about the history of this painting and the history of me. I learned about the painting by reading Walter Benjamin, as have many. The Angelus Novus appears and plays an important role in Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History.
In the Preface to The Drunken Silenus (2020), the first volume of Morgan Meis’s “Three Paintings Trilogy”—which continues with The Fate of the Animals (2022), and culminates in the just published The Grand Valley—Meis tells us why he wrote this first book: “I was working on a style.”
Lawrence’s “The Migration Series” is painted with Casein tempera, a paint derived from milk protein. HeLevi’s poems are composed of air from the lungs, the vibration of the vocal cords, and the shaping of sounds with the mouth and throat. The voice was translated into visual form, alphabetic writing, and was initially preserved in iron gall ink written on parchment or vellum. This poem, these paintings: wonders. The might of human imagination and artistry.
Jon Fosse’s novel Septology (published in Norwegian in 2019) is a monologue beginning and ending in the mind of Asle, an elderly widowed Norwegian painter living in the countryside on the proceeds from the sale of his paintings. He communes throughout the next 667 pages with a self who becomes both him and not him.