Paintings in Fiction | Episode 46

Today’s podcast is part of a series to accompany my current serialized novel, An Interpreter in Vienna, as we investigate the truth in fiction. You can also listen to the podcast via Apple or Spotify or in the Substack app. Please consider adding a quick star rating on the other players to help my reach.

I appreciate your support as a Matterhorn subscriber and look forward to our discussions. As always, feel free to share any of your work related to the conversation. Thank you!

Photo by Adam Dillon on Unsplash

A full AI-created transcript can be accessed on the desktop version.

Keywords:

• Iconic painters of a culture or place

• Vienna: Gustav Klimt

• Destruction/seizing of visual arts

• Literature:

  • J. D. Salinger

  • Herman Melville

  • Natsume Sōseki

  • Haruki Murakami

• Considerations for your work

Considerations for your work:

• How might you include allusion to a painting or painter to consider an idea through artistic movement, biographical elements, or the nature of encountering the painting itself?

• How might you include visual arts in a fictional text to advance the discourse around art and artistry?

•  In what ways can the inclusion of visual arts in your fiction help the reader/viewer to understand places and cultures on different levels or from different perspectives?

Feel free to share your related work or recommendations in the comments.

Texts:

• 2 Museum Shows in Basel podcast

• Klimt Water Serpents II

• Recovered Klimt portrait

• Sothebys on Klimt style (and Japonisme)

• https://www.theviennasecession.com/vienna-secession/

• Woman in Gold, film

• Klimt memorial society

• Klimt Villa

• Political history of Klimt Villa in brief

• Gustav Klimt, a record-breaking painter who symbolizes the looting of Jewish art by the Nazis

• Klimt stairs at Kunst Historisches Museum

• Against a Canvas of Despair, Gaza’s Artists Trace Their Struggle

• Tehran’s Walls, a New Canvas for Protest

• “De Daumier Smith’s Blue Period,” J.D. Salinger (Nine Stories)

• Russell, John. “Salinger, from Daumier to Smith.” Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature 4, no. 1 (1963): 70–87. https://doi.org/10.2307/1207186.

• Whitburn, Merrill D. “‘MOBY-DICK’ AND THE SUBLIME.” The Comparatist 3 (1979): 32–39. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44366653.

• Rubin, Jay, and Natsume Soseki. “Sōseki on Individualism. `Watakushi No Kojinshugi’.” Monumenta Nipponica 34, no. 1 (1979): 21–48. https://doi.org/10.2307/2384280.

• Moby Dick, Herman Melville

• Bassoe, Pedro Thiago Ramos. “Judging a Book by Its Cover: Natsume Sōseki, Book Design, and the Value of Art.” Review of Japanese Culture and Society 29 (2017): 159–74. https://www.jstor.org/stable/48629193.

• Soseki in Japan Times

• Kin’ya Tsuruta. “Sôseki’s Kusamakura: A Journey to ‘The Other Side.’” The Journal of the Association of Teachers of Japanese 22, no. 2 (1988): 169–88. https://doi.org/10.2307/488940.

• ETŌ, JUN. “Natsume Sōseki: A Japanese Meiji Intellectual.” The American Scholar 34, no. 4 (1965): 603–19. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41209314.

• BATTIGELLI, ANNA, ed. Art and Artifact in Austen. University of Delaware Press, 2020. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvwvr2z6.

• “Kusamakura, Natsume Sōseki (translated as Unhuman Tour and The Three-Cornered World)

• Killing Commendatore, Haruki Murakami

• Kafka on the Shore, Murakami

• The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde

• Did North America’s Longest Painting Inspire Moby Dick?

• Cinematic in fiction (my podcast)

• Writing novels like oil painting

• ‘Whales’

• Klimt at Belvedere