Forms of Interaction Between Art and Literature

The research project aims to examine various relationships between literature and art. The American artist Cy Twombly dealt with world literature from different countries and cultures throughout his life. He wove the writers names, quotes, or other elements from literary works into his art. He often changed the quotations, creating new contexts of meaning. The aim of the project is to investigate these contexts of meaning, and to investigate the analogies and differences between literature and art as well as their mixed forms. The focus is on world literature from the 18th to the 21st century: in his works, Twombly makes references to such authors as Goethe, Hölderlin, Kleist, Rilke, and Bachmann; in his library there are books on Musil, as well as on Thomas Mann and Nietzsche. Twombly also refers to Leopardi, Mallarmé, Verlaine, Keats, Dickinson, T. S. Eliot, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Paz, Neruda, Pessoa, Edward Gibbon, Lorca, Philip Whalen, Wallace Stevens, J. C. Ransom, C. P. Cavafy, Seferis, Baudelaire, Saint-Simon, Ivan Albright, Anne Sexton, Patricia Waters, Stendhal, Buson, and W. H. Gass. To date, in Cy Twombly research there have not been individual studies that examine in detail the relationships between literature and art using Twomblys work as an example. The project addresses the gap in the research and analyses the intermedial and transmedial forms of action between art and literature in Twombly. In the selected paintings by Twombly, text and image complement each other to form a combination of media. In order to examine this combination of media, Gotthold Ephraim Lessings terms successiveness and simultaneity, Horaces term ut pictura poesis, and the term literariness are used in the first part of the project. Roland Barthes describes Twomblys work as a work of literature in which language, writing, and narrativity are important. In addition, in the second part of the Twombly project, images will be analysed as autonomous media on e.g. linearity, colour, layers, or the iconographic elements examined. The theories of Richard Rorty, Gottfried Boehm, and W. J. T. Mitchell are considered. The third part of the project compares the works of Goethe, Rilke, Bachmann, and Twombly with regard to the themes of Italy and the city of Rome, as well as plants. For this, the theories of Sigmund Freud, Jan and Aleida Assmann, and Ludwig Wittgenstein are considered. Within the framework of the project, particular attention is paid to German-speaking authors and philosophers. The intention is to place Twombly in the German-speaking culture, because until now the Mediterranean element of his art (see Barthes) has been accentuated. The project positions itself between German and comparative literature as well as art and cultural studies.