Latin poet Horace claimed: « Ut pictura poetica », (poetry is similar to painting). Ever since the Antiquity, painting has been an inspiration to poets and novelists, and writers, from Diderot to Baudelaire, from Balzac, and Zola to Artaud, Apolinaire, Picasso and Braque. Anka Muhlstein and Caroline Weber will delve into the passionate involvement with the fine arts of French novelists Balzac, Zola, Proust, Huysmans, and Maupassant, based on Anka Muhlstein’s new book, The Pen and The Brush: How Passion for Art Shaped Nineteenth-Century French Novels (Other Press, 2017). Muhlstein and Weber will explore the crucial role that painters play as characters in their novels, together with the profound influence that painting exercised on the novelists’ techniques, offering an intimate view of the intertwined worlds of painters and writers at the time.
New York City, NY; NYC