Document Type
Article
Abstract
[First paragraph]
In recent years, Henry M. Sayre, Christopher J. MacGowan, Barbara M. Fisher, Dickran Tashjian, William Marling, and Peter Halter, among others, have written about the influence of visual artists, especially Marsden Hartley, on Williams' poetry, and, conversely, the influence of Williams' poetry on painting. These critics have variously examined the personal, cultural, aesthetic, and ontological dimensions of the visual arts background of Williams' poetry, including "The Great Figure," first published as the final poem in Sour Grapes, 1921, and well-known as the source for Charles Demuth's 1928 painting, The Figure Five in Gold. Especially relevant to the current writing, in The Revolution in the Visual Arts and the Poetry of William Carlos Williams and "Dialogue of the Sister Arts: Number-Poems and Number-Paintings in America, 1920-1970," Halter unpacks the figure 5 as a compact embodiment of the technological dynamic of modernism, and notes the cinematic effect of Williams' poem as well as its indebtedness to Futurism, Cubism, and Dadaism (The Revolution in the Visual Arts . . . , 97-101) and its influence, via Demuth, on later artists such as Jasper Johns and Robert Indiana ("Dialogue of the Sister Arts . . . ," 212-216), arguing, in the latter article, that the intertextual dialogue among the postmodern artists and Demuth consciously influenced form and aesthetic decisions in the latters' works; referring to Johns' encaustic-and-oil-on-canvas The Black Figure Five (1960), for example, commissioned by a collector, Halter notes that "both of them [artist and collector] had the same idea: the two epochs, the twenties and the sixties, and the styles of the two painters [Demuth and Johns] should be confronted with, and related to, one another, in and through, a common motif" (Halter, "Dialogue of the Sister Arts . . . ," 212).
Repository Citation
Lavazzi, Tom. "The Moving Figure: Dialogism in Williams' The Great Figure." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 9, no. 3, 2009, pp. 1–16. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol9/iss3/9