About the meeting between visual art and literature with Gunna Ekelöf, Ole Sarvig and Per Højholt
Gunnar Ekelöf, Ole Sarvig and Per Højholt are among the Nordic writers of the 20th century who have dealt most extensively with visual arts. Bildtale describes these authors' decisive encounters with the visual arts and examines how the texts give voice to paintings and sculptures - how the encounters turn into visual speech. The encounters with the visual arts influence the authors' thinking about their own art, but the encounters also reveal a power struggle between literature and the visual arts. There is thus often a telling contrast between the authors' more general, reflexive essays, where visual art is presented as a model for poetry's form and cognitive possibilities, and the same authors' descriptive texts, where visual art is radically transformed and subordinated to language. In addition to this problem, Billedtale provides a critical introduction to the research tradition that has explored the meeting between literature and the visual arts and predominantly focused on the similarities between the art forms. Along the way, the concepts of language and image are discussed, which through 20th-century modernism undergo major changes and are of decisive importance for the authors treated's thinking about the encounter with the visual arts.
