French Literature Reviews - 2026

B. Vouilloux, Tableaux d'auteurs
Art and Visual Culture

Just published - May 2004 - by PUV (Presses Universitaires de Vincennes)

Bernard VOUILLOUX :
Tableaux d'auteurs
Après l'Ut pictura poesis

"Essais et savoirs" Series

Bernard Vouilloux reassesses concepts inherent to art history through the lens of representations found in literary texts.
He demonstrates how modern writers helped shape the notion of the author in painting.
This study thus bridges the fields of aesthetic criticism in painting (Fragonard, Baudoin, Cézanne) and literary criticism (Diderot, Balzac, Breton).
These literary portraits of painters reveal a paradox: while accelerating the emancipation of painting—thereby consecrating its autonomy—it was through the literary imagination that artists were freed from the constraints of literary imitation imposed upon them by classical rhetoric. A ceaseless game of mirrors, wherein an art form asserts itself only by reflecting upon another that captures it.

The relationship between literature and the visual arts has long occupied scholars of aesthetics and comparative literature. By examining how writers such as Diderot, Balzac, and Breton represented painters in their texts, this volume engages with the long-standing tradition of inter-art dialogue, often discussed under the rubric of ut pictura poesis. Readers interested in the intersections of literary history, art criticism, and the philosophy of representation may find it a relevant contribution to these fields.