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Writers on Artists
Daniel Halpern (ed.)
What happens when novelists and poets—rather than art historians—write about painters? This 1988 anthology, edited by the poet and publisher Daniel Halpern for North Point Press, collects exactly that: literary writers reflecting on artists they love, unbound by scholarly convention. The pleasure is in the angle of vision. A writer's eye catches things a specialist might tidy away, and the prose tends to be a good deal livelier than the catalogue norm. The result is a browsable, companionable book about looking at art, one that treats criticism as a form of personal encounter. For readers who enjoy fine essayistic writing as much as painting itself, or who like their art talk warm and idiosyncratic, it's an inviting collection to dip into rather than march through.
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The editor
Daniel Halpern is an American poet, longtime editor of the literary magazine Antaeus, and founder of Ecco Press—a figure with an unusually wide net across contemporary literature. That editorial reach shows in the range of voices he gathers here.
The book
Writers on Artists, published by North Point Press in 1988, assembles essays in which literary writers take on visual artists, favoring personal engagement over academic apparatus. The through-line is not a thesis but a sensibility: art seen through the temperament of people who make their living with words.
How it reads
Anthologies are uneven by nature, and this one is best sampled rather than read straight through, but the strongest pieces are small gems. Because the writers aren't performing expertise, they're free to be surprising, and the book has aged gracefully as a model of criticism-as-encounter.
For more context
It belongs to a lineage of writer-on-art collections that runs from Baudelaire and Ruskin to modern essayists like John Berger, all insisting that looking well is itself a literary act.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Daniel Halpern (ed.)
- Publisher
- North Point Press
- Place of publication
- San Francisco
- Year
- 1988
- ISBN
- None
- Shelf
- Art
- Location
- Maine