Critical fiction is the literary equivalent of what happens when a visual artist creates a work in direct response or hommage to another artist’s work.
One example: in 1985, when the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts mounted a retrospective of American artist Red Grooms, his relief painting William Penn Shaking Hands with the Indians (1967) was placed within view of Penn’s Treaty with the Indians (1771-72), the original work by Benjamin West, to whose “exemplary American behavior” Grooms paid colorful homage. The effect of juxtaposing the two works from across the centuries was dramatic and memorable.
Readers will be able provide further examples of their own from the history of art.