by Jon Lackman | 11 May 2007 | Journals, Theory
“C’est un fait que l’histoire de la peinture en Occident s’est largement construite en rapport avec la littérature.” This statement appears on the back of the most recent issue of Europe (n.933-934), which is devoted to “Littérature & peinture.” Edited by Daniel Bergez, it includes contributions from Yves Bonnefoy, Gao Xingjian, and many others.
In an essay titled “Lire la peinture?”, Nadelie Laneyrie-Dagen writes:
“In 1999, I published a book, an art-history manual specially designed for young students and the large readership of amateur art lovers. The manual was called Reading Painting [Lire la peinture] … Its title raised hackles … art historians such as Hubert Damisch and artists such as Vincent Corpet affirmed and re-affirmed how little they thought of expressions that indicate that a painted work can be treated as a written work, of assimilations that surely risk denying art’s radical singularity.
[...]
All the same, faced with works, words continue to surface: the words of critics, of preface writers; the words of historians in art books; the words written on museum labels, the words recorded on cassettes made available to exhibition visitors. What Michel Butor once called the ‘halo’ or ‘casing’ of commentary remains as ubiquitous or even more so, the almost inevitable mediation through which he who wishes to see paintings arrives at them.”
