Legendary Art - Literary Figures in Painting and Sculpture
Literature has produced many funny, tragic, and grotesque protagonists. Even painters and sculptors take characters from novels, fairy tales and legends as models for their works and thus help the literary characters, who initially exist only in the readers' imagination, to take on a visible shape.
Literature as a source of inspiration for the visual arts has a long tradition. The most obvious connection between art and literature can be found in book illustrations. Until the 20th century, it was quite common for artists, including today's very famous ones such as Oskar Kokoschka, Max Liebermann and Ernst Barlach, to produce illustrations for novels and volumes of poetry. Especially in children's books and books of fairy tales, the pictures take on a high significance; here, drawings and text are sometimes inseparable, as in the case of Wilhelm Busch, for example. And the influence of fairy tales extends into contemporary art: Sigmar Polke was inspired by German fairy tales and legends, David Hockney painted paintings based on stories by the Brothers Grimm, and Ottmar Hörl exhibited 800 of his "Frog Kings" in Darmstadt.
You can find some examples of how literary figures have found their way into the visual arts here...
