The Dual Muse: The Writer as Artist, The Artist as Writer. Catalogue of the Exhibition. Introduction by Cornelia Homburg

For centuries an artist adept in one medium has found solace, encouragement, and inspiration in another, even to the point of merging them. Michelangelo put down his chisel to pick up his pen; Blake pictorialized his poetry; Max Ernst collaged narratives; Gertrude Stein adopted a cubist style. This bicameral interplay of the verbal and pictorial has never been more pronounced than in our own time. The Dual Muse explores a range of creative interrelationships between the visual arts and literary media in works by selected modern and contemporary artists and authors.
This catalogue is published in conjunction with an exhibition and symposium organized by the Washington University Gallery of Art and the Washington University International Writers Center, St. Louis. The exhibition catalogue illustrates the 67 pieces in the exhibition with 38 color plates and contains essays on the relationship of literary and visual arts by William Gass and Johanna Drucker, with an introduction by Cornelia Homburg.
A companion volume containing proceedings from The Dual Muse symposium being held at Washington University in St. Louis on November 7-9, 1997 will be available in 1999. The symposium book will include papers by artists and authors Jennifer Bartlett, Breyten Breytenbach, Tom Phillips, and Derek Walcott.
Co-published with Washington University Gallery of Art and International Writers Center, Washington University in St. Louis.

Once upon a time, it was customary for educated persons to include both literature and painting in their studies, and to consider writing and drawing to be desirable skills. Some familiarity with a musical instrument was also expected. People communicated by letter, entertained at home with amateur recitals, and when traveling abroad recorded memorable moments in their diaries, or rendered notable sights through pencil, ink, and watercolor sketches. Music, painting, and poetry were graces expected of men and women of refined taste everywhere. The same hand might employ a pen or pencil to figure accounts, confess love, or depict a scene, and in most cases the hand's skills would have been learned in school as a matter of course. The hand was the carrier of music to the ear; it brought a thought out from the mind; it formed a figure for the eye. The pen and brush resembled one another, paper and canvas were as twins, and each were worked upon or directed by educated fingers no less than the flute, the recorder, or the piano were.

-from William Gass's "La maison d'en face or that Other Art"