The window gives a particular vision to the spectator, as it frames the world as a painting. Both closed and open, it gives access to a certain reality. It is then no surprise that the window inspired painters and writers, from Goethe to Mallarmé and Shakespeare, and from Matisse to Vermeer. Their representations appear throughout this book, in a journey both literary and pictorial, giving different visions of the world.
2018 / 16 x 20 cm / 168 p. / ISBN : 979-10-92444-41-4
Essay / Art / Painting / Literature / Poetry / Window
We use to say that the eyes are the windows to the soul. We also say that the paintings are like windows. In fact, everything is a question of passage from the inside to the outside. The door, as an opening, lets the body, in its whole, pass the threshold. The window just offers a sight of the world, where the senses are invited. The window decides to hide or show everything, then becoming an opening or a closing. Better than an object, the window becomes a form, a way of being, of seeing : a language. Every painter and writer have used it. This essay aims to give all its plenitude and meaning to this art of the window, in a journey both pictorial and literary. This art, both surprising and stunning, is here studied through the example of various artists, from Graal to Rilke, from Shakespeare to Proust, from Goethe to Mallarmé, from Cervantès to Flaubert, but also from Vermeer to Bonnard, from Friedrich to Matisse, or from Bruegel to Chirico.
Pascal Dethurens was born in 1965. Professor of literature in the University of Strasbourg, he is a specialist of modern literature, and of the relationship between arts. He published several books on those subjects, such as Musique et littérature au XXe siècle (1998), Peinture et littérature au XXe siècle (2007) or Écrire la peinture de Diderot à Quignard (2009). He is also a writer, and he has published two novels.