Chapter Two: Ekphrasis

Ekphrasis is a word that means something that describes art. Often the thing doing the describing is art itself: much poetry has been written about paintings, for instance, just as painters have painted images of sculptures and ceramics made by other artists. Other examples might be a short story about an opera or a piece of music that responds to a film. All of these may be considered ekphrastic. But a film or music critic who describes the piece of work they’re considering is also engaging in ekphrasis, as are students of literature and painting who describe the work they’re studying in their own words before they move on to analyzing it.

Ekphrastic writing is an act of translation: it is the challenge of translating a work of art from one medium into another, reforming it for a new purpose or context, which might be analysis or it might be explanation or it might be to create new art from the old. Inevitably, the viewer or reader’s own “eye” will impact what they choose to describe, in what order, and in what way, and what they accidentally or intentionally leave out. Evaluating your own or other’s ekphrastic writing will reveal the values and interests of the ekphrastic writer. Some writers deliberately use this fact to create rhetorical, political, and artistic effects that build on another’s work, as both Anne Sexton and W.H. Auden do in their poems about two great paintings, discussed below.

While much academic writing will rely on rhetorical analysis – the analysis of how a writer or speaker makes an argument – in order to develop visual literacy, you must be good at ekphrasis alongside rhetorical analysis. The origins of the words ekphrasis and rhetoric (both Ancient Greek words) is a useful one for illustrating how they fit together. The word ekphrasis comes from “speaking” (phrasis) “out” (ek), while the origin of “rhetoric” is simply “speaker” (rhetor). So while ekphrasis involves “speaking out” about a piece of artwork, rhetorical analysis is interested in who the speaker – or artist, or poet, or filmmaker – is and what they’re doing to achieve the effects that the artwork, essay, or argument demonstrates.

You cannot successfully analyze the rhetorical effects of an artwork or text without being able to describe it effectively, and you cannot respond to an artwork without leaving a trace of your own preconceptions inside of that description. The challenge of developing visual literacy is one that requires advanced ekphrastic as well as rhetorical capabilities. The following pages will aim to help you develop those advanced capabilities and prepare you to write essays that perform “rhetorical analysis” on images.

The good news: You’ve already begun to write “ekphrastically” with your exercises on compositional analysis. Now it’s time to look at how other writers use ekphrasis to engage with art.

Works Cited and Further Reading

The following works are either cited in the chapter or used in my teaching about ekphrasis. Note that the citations are in MLA (Modern Languages Association) format. Mastering a citation format will be an important part of demonstrating competent academic writing and practice and an integral part of preventing accusations of plagiarism.

Many guides can be found online for how to accurately cite almost anything in an essay. Throughout this book you’ll find paintings, poems, chapters, essays, films, anthologies, and books cited.

Auden, W.H. “Musée des Beaux Arts”. The Collected Poetry of W.H. Auden, Random House, 1945.

Bruegel, Pieter. Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. 1560, Royal Museums of Fine Arts, Belgium.

Foucault, Michel. “Las Meninas”. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. Vintage Books, 1994.

Kahlo, Frida. Diego on My Mind (Self-Portrait as Tehuana). 1943, Gelman Foundation Collection, Mexico City.

Marshall, Kerry James. Untitled (Studio). 2014, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Sexton, Anne. “The Starry Night.” The Complete Poems of Anne Sexton, Houghton Mifflin, 1981.

van Gogh, Vincent. The Starry Night. 1889, Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Velázquez, Diego. Las Meninas. 1656, Museo del Prado, Madrid.

Walker, Kara. Gone. 1994, Museum of Modern Art, New York.