If I were an old-fashioned editor reading the subtitle above, I would pick up the blue pencil and come up with something more like “Ekphrasis – writing about art” and that would miss the point. There is no lack of writing about art, but true ekphrasis is in decline.
The word ekphrasis comes from the ancient Greeks and means literary writing that describes in detail a work of art.
The visual arts have been around for something like 20,000 years, if we start with the cave paintings in Lascaux, France. For virtually all the time that artists have created, photography and color printing did not exist, and art had to be experienced directly. People learned about the existence of great art from great writers (and talkers) who could use words to describe the artwork and convey its essence. The best ekphratic writers could almost place the reader in front of the painting through the strength of their prose.
Ekphratic writing reached its apotheosis in the nineteenth century with art critics like Walter Pater and John Ruskin. Pater’s essay on the Mona Lisa is still referred to as perhaps the most revered literary piece on a work of art.
There was a heightened appreciation for the visual arts in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The English upper classes embarked on their grand tours to Italy and France to develop an appreciation of great classical artwork. With limited access to reproductions, and those mostly in black and white, the only way to learn about artwork in advance of the trip to the Continent was through great descriptive writing.
In the nineteenth century, a burgeoning middle class developed a greater interest in paintings. The large-scale landscapes of Church and Bierstadt captured the landscape of the United States with power and drama. When these paintings were first displayed, it was real news. But newspapers did not have the technology to show the paintings to their readers. Instead, they relied on the power of the written description.
Writing about art changed with better photography and printing and the ability to reproduce almost any image in any publication. The color illustration in a book or periodical meant that the art historian could walk the reader through what he was seeing, as well as the history of the object and the creator.
Ekphratic writing is declining as the focus of the art historian and critic has changed. The study of art is now less about the object itself and more about the social, political, and economic context in which the work was produced. Writing about these factors now takes prominence over writing about the object. Politicization trumps connoisseurship.
There is also an increased tendency to write about art solely in terms of the emotions and feelings that it evokes, with little or no reference to the object itself, resulting in writing that is solipsistic rather than ekphratic.
Maybe longer form writing on Substack and other platforms will bring about a return to an art literature with at least a partial emphasis on ekphrasis, pieces that I would like to read and that I would also hope to write.
To be placed before an art object exclusively by the “strength of the (writer’s) prose” : what a testimony that is to the power of words. Thanks Drake for introducing me to ekphrasis.