Painting and Poetic Meaning

In the dialogue between painter and beholder, one spirit communicates something deeply felt about our common world; another takes it up and makes it part of their own understanding. Elegant in both style and insight, Painting and Poetic Meaning asks how meaning arises in art, how a viewer understands it, and what values are implicated in this exchange. Through his illuminating reflections on fifteen works spanning seven centuries – from Cimabue's Crucifixion and Rembrandt's Bathsheba at Her Bath to Pablo Picasso’s Las Meninas series – Harry Underwood shows how painting grounds poetic meaning. Great paintings expand the very idea of the beautiful, renewing the vision of those who behold them. Turning to paintings such as Lynette Yiadom-Boakye's Complication, Underwood confronts the predicament of contemporary art, arguing that works destined to endure are marked not by fashion but by devotion to craft, fidelity to reality, and poetic imagination. His closing question is the one that has always mattered most: whether a piece belongs only to its own moment or enters the timeless conversation through which art renews beauty and re-enchants the world. Accessible, graceful, and deeply learned, this book is an indispensable companion for anyone seeking to understand not only how paintings speak, but why great art continues to transform those who behold it.