In an essay for Lit Hub, Joe Mungo Reed offers advice for using real works of art in your fiction. “Often, a piece of art in fiction is an object of yearning; a thing that one person has and another wants, which thus puts into motion a whole clanking apparatus of fictional machinery,” Reed says. “A picture can be the MacGuffin that makes a novel go, but that doesn’t mean the picture is merely a token.”
Reed compares choosing the right artwork for your fiction to buying the right pieces. “The novelist must consider their taste, the impression they want the work to project, the setting in which they are seeking to display it,” he writes.
The right picture should fit into the setting of the novel and also reflect the theme. The artwork itself has its own theme, which can be co-opted or misunderstood by your characters. Reed breaks down a few novels – including The Goldfinch, American Psycho, and several works of Don DeLillo – to examine how the artworks named in the text support the characterization and theme.
Still, once you’ve chosen the artwork that best fits your story, you still need to place it properly. “Neither reader not writer wants to feel that a piece of art is more interesting than the story in which it is contained, and so the writer is faced with the challenge of doing the work they have chosen (or invented) justice,” Reed says.
Rather that describing the work in detail, Reed suggests it might be enough to gesture at it, to show how your characters relate to it. In this manner, the artwork becomes a part of your setting and your characterization, an organic whole.
