## First book devoted to Derek Walcott’s lifelong engagement with the Atlantic visual arts * Bringing together local, Atlantic and global dimensions and putting in dialogue and contextualising Walcott’s work with the works of specific artists, it retraces Walcott’s unique, empowering, but utterly neglected ‘art history’ * Brings to the fore the importance and reverberations of interdisciplinary dialogues in the Atlantic world and in decolonising discourses and processes * Sheds new light on the ways in which Walcott conjugated his engagement with the European, North/South American and African American traditions, envisaged their relationship with Caribbean culture and redefined the role he believed the latter should and could play on an Atlantic and global scale * 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 not only explicitly revealed but also 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 scrutinised, 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”. Contextualising and putting in conversation Walcott’s published and unpublished writings (poems, plays, essays, journalism) and his drawings or paintings (privately owned and publicly disseminated) with specific artists from the Caribbean,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 America, __Derek Walcott’s Painters__ recalibrates and sharpens our understanding of Walcott’s articulation of his own politics and poetics and of the Caribbean’s contributions to Atlantic and global culture. Contents Figures Series Editors’ Preface Acknowledgements Introduction Chapter 1 A Brief History of a Vocation in (about) Fifteen Objects Chapter 2 Atelier des Tropiques: The Local Scene Chapter 3 Voyages to Cythera and the European Legacy Chapter 4 American Visions I – Frescoes of the New World and Black America Chapter 5 American Visions II – Black Odysseys Chapter 6 Painting (and) the Caribbean: The Awe of the Ordinary and the Search for Anonymity Chapter 7 Poems ‘Out Of’ Paintings: Towards an Ekphrasis of Relation Farewell Bibliography General Index Index to Derek Walcott’s Archival Material
