Artist as Writer (ekphrasis)

Romaine Brooks (1874–1970) was an American painter most known for her muted color palette and deeply personal portraits that challenged conventional ideas of gender and sexuality. Among her sitters were the dancer Ida Rubinstein and the poet and novelist Natalie Barney. She spent most of her life in Paris, where she was a leading figure of an artistic counterculture of upper-class Europeans and American expatriates, many of whom were creative, bohemian, and homosexual. Brooks’s career reached its height in 1925, when her work was exhibited in London, Paris, and New York. In the 1930s, Brooks began work on her autobiography, No Pleasant Memories, which consists of sketches of her troubled childhood, musings on artists’ roles in society, and reflections on her own rejection of the norms and traditions of art. Largely forgotten by art history, Brooks bequeathed a number of her paintings to the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC, where recent exhibitions have sparked a renewed interest in her work.

Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) is one of the most significant French artists of the late nineteenth century, widely recognized for his contributions to postimpressionism. Gauguin’s work is held in museum collections worldwide, and his notebooks and travel journals have been published and translated into many languages.

Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849) was born in Edo (present-day Tokyo), Japan, and was known by at least thirty names during his lifetime. In 1798, he declared his artistic independence and officially adopted the name Hokusai. From that point until his death, he worked in three distinct formats: single-sheet prints, book illustrations, and multicolor paintings. Around 1831, when he was in his early seventies, he produced his most celebrated print series, Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, which includes the Great Wave, the painting for which he is best known. Numerous impressions of these works are in public and private collections outside of Japan, and Hokusai’s rich artistic legacy continues to draw attention and admiration around the world.

Derek Jarman (1942–1994) was an English artist, filmmaker, set designer, diarist, author, and gardener. After attending King's College London and the Slade School of Art, he began a career as a painter. As a set designer, he worked on such productions as The Royal Ballet’s Jazz Calendar (1968) and The English National Opera’s production of Don Giovanni (1968), as well as a number of films. In the early 1970s, Jarman began a series of filmworks made with Super 8, followed by his first full-length feature film, Sebastiane, in 1975. He went on to make ten more feature films, among them the famous experimental Caravaggio (1986) and The Garden (1990). His final feature, Blue, was first shown at the Biennale Arte, Venice, in June 1993, seven months before his death.

Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) is known for an innovative sculptural style in which the traces of his working process are conserved in the works’ final form. His career began in Brussels and later shifted to Paris, where he undertook public commissions that dovetailed with academic trends affirming clarity in sculptural language. These afforded him the support to pursue bolder aesthetic experimentation in private. Rodin’s attention to partial figures and fragmentation and his privileging of emotive pathos over allegory are hallmarks of his groundbreaking and influential style.

Dedicated to publishing rare, out-of-print, and newly commissioned texts as accessible paperback volumes the ekphrasis series is part of David Zwirner Books’s ongoing effort to publish new and surprising pieces of writing on visual culture.

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