In his take on Greenbergian Modernism in Inside the White Cube, Brian O’Doherty claimed that ‘fables give you more latitude than art history’. From Michael Baxandall’s Patterns of Intention and David Carrier’s Principles of Art History Writing to James Elkins Our Beautiful, Dry and Distant Texts and T J Clark’s The Sight of Death, there has been a notable and renewed interest in the literary and writerly qualities of art historical scholarship over the last three decades. New art historical writing has increasingly adopted the techniques and forms of fiction, while older models of art history – once read only for their elucidatory or interpretative content - have been reappraised and re-invoked in terms of style and form.

Such narrative shifts perhaps represent an attempt to undermine or contest the dogmatic, prescriptive modes of writing which dominated the discipline in the late twentieth century, approaches described by the late American artist Mike Kelley as ‘the oppressive, institutionalised version of art history’. In acknowledging the limits (or impossibility) of art history as an objective, neutral pursuit bound by teleology and exhaustive theory, recent art history writing has tentatively embraced hybrid forms melding fiction, theory and history.

In the work of art historians such as Teju Cole, Rebecca Solnit, Carol Mavor and Marina Warner, art history can be seen as both a field and form of writing and a creative practice in its own right. Using these and other examples of recent art historical writing, this paper will argue for models of art history which adopt the forms of creative non-fiction, ekphrasis and literature. In particular, it will examine specific texts by art historians and theorists which approach language as material to identify instances whereby art history as writing becomes fantastic, metaphorical and lyrical.