Les tableaux parlants de Robert Walser (Histoires d’images)

This paper explores Walser’s book Looking at Pictures (Vor den Bildern, ed. Bernhard Echte, 2006) on several levels. It considers the access Walser had to the various paintings – mostly via photographs or ‘reproductions’ ; Walser’s eye for the placement of paintings in domestic space ; his sense of the hierarchies of images, as well as the creative way he perceives the relationships between the middle and edges of paintings, between the foreground and the background. Finally, it argues that Walser’s texts about painting are characterized by a kind of animism of the paintings, based on their narrative potential.