Forgive me if I'm not understanding something, but how exactly does a zine about art history incorporate writers?
In the early 1560s, a student of Pieter Bruegels the Elder copied his now-lost painting, called “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.” It was not the best painting, or the best copy of a painting, or even the best depiction of the fall of Icarus.
This painting meant nothing, to anyone, for centuries. In 1912, a museum purchased it, where it hung on a wall and continued to mean nothing whatsoever and was well on it’s way to being forgotten except as a tool to demonstrate how we determine what is and is not a copy of a painting; until, in 1939, W. H. Auden published his 21-line free-verse poem called “Musee des Beaux Arts” in the modernist magazine New Writing, and all of a sudden the painting meant something. William Carlos Williams, a poet and one of the greatest modernist writers, wrote a second poem, also called “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus,” and cemented the painting as an essential part of not only every literature anthology of 20th century writing but art and painting studies as well.
Without writing, art history can’t be complete. The history of literature and poetry is the history of art -- the Vorticists and the Modernists and the Cubists and the early Abstract Impressionists and the Futurists all published in the same magazines, ran in the same circles, learned and grew and bounced ideas off each other. Picasso’s paintings hung in Gertrude Stein’s salon. There are a thousand, thousand iconic paintings based out of Shakespeare and Tennyson, Magritte painted a scene from Poe -- the two forms are intertwined inseparably.
The better question would be: how could a zine about art history exclude authors?
