Poetry in Paint: Ut Pictura Poesis and Magritte
By: Sara Cantwell
Tags: Poetry, Philosophy, Painting, Language, Theory

Magritte’s artistic endeavors made him unique among his peers because he appreciated poetic thinking. Suzi Gablik’s Magritte shows a painter saturated in the artistic and philosophical movements of his time and her assessment of Magritte places the painter in the larger conversation of poetic aesthetics existing before Horace developed his treatise on poetics. I have a deep appreciation for Magritte’s attempt to develop an aesthetic that transcended formal genre constraints, even as I came to understand the limits that halted his efforts.

I want to start by laying out my understanding of how poetry and paintings have been seen to work together and why I believe they are not the same but serve a similar purpose. Before I can do this, I need to establish that my view is not like Horace’s in his Ars Poetica which philosophers have tended to use when thinking about poetry:

Few expressions of aesthetic criticism have led to more comment over a period of several centuries than [ut pictura poesis], “as is painting so is poetry” (Horace, Ars Poetica). Even with partial explanation, the Horatian comparison of painting and poetry was as tentative as the proper Augustan wished it to be. The notion that poetry and painting are alike had had some currency even before Horace, who probably knew — even if he may not have assumed that his audience would recall — the more explicit earlier statement of Simonides of Keos (first recorded by Plutarch, De gloria Atheniensium, 3.347a, more than a century after Ars Poetica): “Poema pictura loquens, pictura poema silens” (poetry is a speaking picture, painting a silent [mute] poetry).[1]

The theory of ut pictura poesis shows contemporary poets have a long and complicated history with painters to contend with because poets either have to admit they are one and the same with other arts or stake a claim on certain characteristics of their art form and police these arbitrary seeming boundaries. While I would argue there is much more nuance to that argument and that artists are making a binary argument here where there needn’t be one, I see Magritte as part of the trend away from policing the boundaries between these art forms in order to push through them and find common ground in artistic expressions:

The relation between poetry and painting was strikingly reaffirmed in the period between 1910 and 1930 by the poets of Futurism, Dada, and Surrealism (e.g., Marinetti, Tzara, Schwitters, Breton) and by the poets of De Stijl (e.g. Theo van Doesberg). In New York a close affinity developed between painters (e.g. William Marsden, Marcel Duchamp) and such poets as Mina Loy, William Carlos Williams, and Wallace Stevens. In the work of these poets — and in the later work of “Concrete Poets” the old concept of [ut pictura poesis] is revived.[2]

Magritte quite easily fits into this category of artists who were reviving ut pictura poesis. I feel like most of his work is centered around the paradox that ut pictura poesis creates between the poet and the painter. In fact, Wallace Stevens takes the idea of ut pictura poesis almost as a call to action for writers to engage with the paradox of poems being paintings:

Stevens argues that, because poetry and painting operate at the juncture between imagination and reality, these arts assume a prophetic stature and become a “vital assertion of self in a world where nothing but the self remains, if that remains.” […] Stevens first saw the quotation from Picasso [“une somme de destructions”] in a special issue of Cahiers d’art devoted to surrealism. This same reference appears in “Relations Between Poetry and Painting,” suggesting the extent to which the literature of art could influence poetry: “Does not the saying of Picasso that a picture is a horde of destructions also say that a poem is a horde of destructions?”[3]

I want to express right away that while I do not disagree with Horace or Stevens that poetry and painting (or image-based work if you want to include photography, graphic art, and cinemaphotography) do perform a very similar function, I disagree that these art forms are one and the same. They each have different capabilities for delivering the memetic information they hold, the “horde of destructions” as it were, even as they are all ways to contain such information.

The problem with saying that a painting is the same as a poem or vice versa is that these forms are not all perceived by the body senses similarly, nor are they processed by the brain in the same way. There is a distinction between sensory reception and the time/schema required to translate meaning for each art form. Writing is a code that must be transcribed as it is received word by word, a visual piece is taken in all at once by the senses and then the interpretable signs are put through a decoding process in the visual cortex, and auditory perception is both in need of translation (for spoken word) and more ephemeral than visual perception (although you could make a case for the ephemeral nature of film as well):

Lessing opens his Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry (1766) by observing that “the first who compared painting with poetry [Simonides of Ceos] was a man of fine feeling,” though, Lessing makes it clear, not a critic or philosopher. Lessing argues that painting is a synchronic, visual phenomenon, one of space that is immediately in its entirety understood and appreciated, while poetry (again, in its widest sense) is a diachronic art of the ear, one that depends on time to unfold itself for the reader’s appreciation. He recommends that poetry and painting should not be confused, and that they are best practiced and appreciated “as two equitable and friendly neighbors.”[4]

And I feel this state of being “two equitable and friendly neighbors” is why I find such joy in the process of writing ekphrastic poetry. There is something about the process of decoding and/or responding to the meaning of a painting with poetry that feels like I am taking the ideas of the painter and molding them into something new that unfurls in time.

Much like Suzi Gablik, I find Magritte’s work a trove of ideas that lend themselves to poetry. I think Magritte was also finding the joy of translating the characteristics of poetics into paintings and had created some fascinating art based on poetic philosophy. But art that translates a poetic philosophy of language into paint is by Magritte’s design, not a symptom of painting in general. And because of the differing modes audiences use to perceive visual art and the written word, a project to make a poem out of paint would be a difficult, near impossible undertaking.

Now that I have established this stance on an old problem with aesthetics I want to talk about why, regardless of what Magritte may have had for goals, I feel his art is so useful to poets today. The challenge of meaning-making through the use of objects in Magritte’s paintings is a great way for poets to think about the difference between denotative and connotative meanings and how poets use these levels of meaning in their work. The effect of “bewilderment”[5] Magritte developed by establishing and/or complicating the relationship held between two items is not at all unlike what Julia Kristeva illustrates as the function of poetry:

So within this saturated, if not already closed socio-symbolic order [of a language system], poetry — more precisely, poetic language — reminds us of its eternal function: to introduce through the symbolic that which works on, moves through, and threatens it. The theory of the unconscious [developed by Sigmund Freud] seeks the very thing that poetic language practices within and against the social order: the ultimate means of its transformation or subversion, the precondition for its survival and revolution.[6]

Kristeva is saying we need poetics to keep the meaning we place in words, and thus in objects, plastic so that they can be adapted to what the discourse of the community needs. While we may have a denotive meaning that seems locked to an object, poets can manipulate it by building connotations over time in a poem that shifts the word/object so far from the denotative meaning it becomes barely recognizable. This is part of how the human mind is so adept at overcoming obstacles, we change our perception of reality to better fit with information we get from the world around us and pass that new schema on through media. And in the case of poets, this means adapting the meanings we imbed in the written word.

Poets need to continually play with meaning so that they can adapt or clarify it as needed. They add and subtract connotations, manipulate the sign and what it signifies, and manipulate the overall perception of a subject on the level of the symbolic order used to convey meaning. This play with meaning can also be found in visual art by looking at how representations of an object can carry the same meanings as words in a poem. And Magritte worked hard to make the concept/object relationship take on whole new importance when the object is removed from the context they were made to operate in, brought down to a denotative level of meaning, and then stripped of, or given new meaning through its juxtapositions with other objects.

A large part of Magritte’s success is in his ability to recognize how objects are embedded with the narratives about how these narratives are related to other objects. And he can then manipulate the way those relational narratives are structured. If, for example, an umbrella is to keep out water and a water glass is to keep water contained there is a “hidden correspondence”[7] between them in their manipulations of water. That correspondence is innately attached to the creator of the objects and begs a question about why we both want to contain and reject water.

Of course, each object, in reality, has a function in a particular circumstance but an audience viewing Hegel’s Holiday (1958) must look at the umbrella and the glass in the juxtaposition of each other and nothing else. By setting these limits for his audience he makes the paradox the central narrative, not just an unexplored consequence of the reality those two objects exist in. This critical focus gives the paradox of water its sense of being extraordinary and the simple rendering of the objects halts the influx of meaning from the reality around it. The outside world just does not matter to the focus on the painting’s subjects and their relationship to each other. And Magritte was onto a secret of poetics as he did this relational work: in subverting reality we understand it better.

Narratives, even as they are tied to objects by their shared meanings, are exclusionary. They can make one story seem to be the only way to think about something and as Gablik points out,

“Magritte’s paintings are a systematic attempt to disrupt any dogmatic view of the physical world. By means of the interference of conceptual paradox, he causes ordinary phenomena to inherit extraordinary and improbable conclusions.”

Like other surrealists of his time, Magritte took the meanings of the objects he used and broke them through transformation. I truly feel what Magritte’s audience is feeling in their “bewilderment” of his art is how he is threatening their understanding of the objects viewed. But unlike his surrealist peers, breaking meaning is not enough for Magritte. He wants to deconstruct the reality that built them in the first place.

Suzi Gablik said of Magritte, “[h]is pictures disturb the elaborate compromise that exists between the mind and life. In Magritte’s paintings, the world’s haphazard state of consciousness is transformed into a single will” and I am left thinking about how this statement could easily apply to a poet. In fact, I find myself thinking that Magritte was likely a poet who painted because it was trendy and had to find a compromise between his talent for poetic philosophy and his passion for painting.

The shifting focus in the painting community from perfecting a technique to perfecting the content, coupled with the surrealist’s reactionary response to capitalism and realism, was the perfect atmosphere for Magritte to thrive. While I don’t think a painting can ever be a poem, it is not because Magritte did not give a herculean effort to make it so. He is one of few painters to come close to painting a poem and I would even argue that his paintings incorporating text are a hybrid form requiring multiple layered literacies in order to be able to create and interpret them. But, when I consider what makes something a poem or a painting I am more inclined to think about what it takes for an audience to receive the message than what the artist or a vendor wanted to label it. It is our experience of an art form, what it does to the human body, that makes it a certain genre. But, bless Magritte for trying to grapple with a very old paradoxical notion.

[1] “Ut Pictura Poesis.” University of Pennsylvania. http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/utpict.html

[2] “Ut Pictura Poesis.” U Penn.

[3] “Wallace Stevens: The Problems of Painters and Poets.” Poets.org. https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/text/wallace-stevens-problems-painters-and-poets

[4] “Ut pictura poesis.” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ut_pictura_poesis

[5] Gablik, Suzi. Magritte. Thames and Hudson Inc., 1985. PP. 99.

[6] Kristeva, Julia. Revolution in Poetic Language. Columbia UP, 1984. PP. 80.

*As a side note, I am aware of the complicated nature of Kristeva’s credibility but for the purposes of this article, I believe the quoted material is sound logic.

[7] Gablik, Suzi. Magritte. Thames and Hudson Inc., 1985. PP. 110.