Intermedial comparison is an area of study that, though not new, has received fresh impetus in recent years, as we have come to recognize more and more clearly the extent to which the narrow confines of individual disciplines limit our search for a comprehensive understanding of creative works. But postulations of vague similarities are not enough. Like all generalizations, they obscure the precise detail of the relationship rather than elucidating it. On the other hand, as Erwin Panofsky established already in 1932, a one-to-one set of correspondences between texts and paintings cannot be established, as a direct “translation” from one medium to another is impossible. Any description of a picture in words cannot but distort — or even suppress — the original “voice” of the picture, even if only by adding an emphasis or evaluation in its description. There are, however, clearly definable structural and thematic correspondences between paintings and literary texts; and intermedial comparison can and should explore these as scrupulously as possible.

Where, as in Hesse’s case, texts and paintings are produced by the same artist, this adds an extra interest to the inquiry. In such analyses of the work of “multiple talents,” the starting point is the hypothesis that the artist’s creative aims are the same in both media. The investigation can thus focus on the relationship between the different realizations of this creative motivation. That Hesse pursued the same aims in his painting and writing is evident from comments such as one he wrote in a letter to the National-Zeitung in Basel in 1920: “Sie werden sehen, daß zwischen meiner Malerei und Dichtung keine Diskrepanz herrscht, daß ich auch hier nicht der naturalistischen, sondern der poetischen Wahrheit nachgehe” (You will see that there is no discrepancy between my painting and my poetic work, that here also I pursue not naturalistic, but instead poetic truth). Representation of this poetic truth is not possible by mimetic efforts alone; it is the expression of a perceived connection and unison between the physical world and the subjective world of the artist — a capturing of external phenomena and an expression of innermost emotions at the same time. This chapter will explore how Hesse developed the concept of art as the expression of poetic truth in his painting as well as in his writing in the first years of his working in both media, 1918 to 1922.