Derek Walcott's Painters: A Life with Pictures

This book explores Derek Walcott's lifelong engagement with the Atlantic visual arts, highlighting his neglected art history and interdisciplinary dialogues. It retraces his interactions with specific artists, shedding light on his contributions to Caribbean and global culture.

Format: Hardback
Length: 504 pages
Publication date: 31 July 2023
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

The first book dedicated to Derek Walcott's lifelong engagement with the Atlantic visual arts brings together local, Atlantic, and global dimensions, engaging in dialogue and contextualizing Walcott's work with the works of specific artists. Retracing Walcott's unique, empowering, yet utterly neglected art history, the book highlights the importance and reverberations of interdisciplinary dialogues in the Atlantic world and in decolonizing discourses and processes. Shedding new light on the ways in which Walcott conjugated his engagement with the European, North/South American, and African American traditions, envisioned their relationship with Caribbean culture, and redefined the role he believed the latter should and could play on an Atlantic and global scale, the book is mindful of Walcott's attention to painting techniques but, most importantly, foregrounds his keen interest in the multiple narratives that the visual works he was confronting explicitly revealed and implicitly suggested. Highlights the attention Walcott paid to the circumstances and locations of his encounters with the works in question (i.e., local settings, metropolitan museums, and artbooks). Walcott's lifelong concern with painting and painters deeply inflected his aesthetics and politics. Walcott's interventions on the relationship between Caribbean and colonial history have been thoroughly scrutinized, but, arguably, Walcott was also keen to address and (re)write an art history of which, paraphrasing a line from Omeros, the Caribbean too was/is capable. Contextualizing and putting in conversation Walcott's published and unpublished writings (poems, plays, essays, journalism) and his drawings or paintings (privately owned and publicly disseminated) with specific artists from the Caribbean, Europe, South, and North, the book offers a comprehensive and multifaceted exploration of Walcott's artistic and intellectual legacy.

Weight: 1124g
Dimension: 250 x 176 x 30 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781399512138