Building on the work of major critics in the field of text and image, and color theory, the author examines how A. S. Byatt's "Art Work," from The Matisse Stories, is the textual equivalent of Matisse's visual experiments with color and composition. She argues that Byatt's story presents itself as a "verbal still life," not just for its attempt to cross the boundaries between the literary and the
... [Show full abstract] pictorial but also for its impossible endeavor to render the "stillness," understood as "silence," of pictures.