The word in art

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Art, Word and Image: 2,000 Years of Visual/Textual Interaction

Edited by John Dixon Hunt, David Lomas and Michael Corris

In the Western traditions of art history, the visual and the textual have enjoyed a special relationship.  This new book explores it through the use of wordsin the visual arts, rather than the use of words to describe the visual. John Dixon Hunt begins by identifying four ways in which artists have employed text.  The first is a deliberate attempt to foreground the primacy of the text, as in the creation of visual equivalents of biblical episodes in the Middle Ages.  Words are also implied in works that suggest the spoken or written, such as the recitation of a narrative, but do not necessarily reproduce the text. 

Dixon Hunt’s analysis of the use of titles (additive/supplementary words)  is very perceptive, and examines the widespread use, and often arbitrary form, of titles of works in galleries and museums.  Occasionally, the author notes, the image is insufficient, and verbal augmentation is required, citing the emblem book that relied on some explication of the visual sign.

Although many images were intended for instruction, as in stained glass panels in the cathedrals or illuminated psalters of northern Europe, the emergence of printing and proliferation of classical sources also led to reinterpretation.  Dixon Hunt’s examination of how these sources were reinterpreted and led to multiple meanings, as in the satirical works of artists such as William Hogarth, is insightful and sets the stage for the playfulness and dark humour of European modernism.  Joseph Viscomi concentrates on William Blake’s pioneering technique of ‘illuminated printing’ and explores the interplay of his poetry and images.  For those who have read The Tyger, or heard it aloud, it is indeed another experience to ‘see’ Blake’s illuminated words on the page, a clear example of how text was affected by the artist’s illustrations and colour schemes.

David Lomas examines the roles of word and image in the European avant-garde from 1900–45.  The Cubists, Surrealists, Dadaists and Futurists all played with the visual and textual in their work, from Guillaume Apollinaire’s ‘calligrams’ (images of objects composed of words) to the visual (and verbal) punning of Marcel Duchamp.  Lomas considers how the works produced within this period allowed the word to take centre stage and subvert the viewer’s expectations. 

Jeremy Adler explores the interplay of word and image in Klee’s oeuvre, revealing a remarkable synthesis of different European art movements and the inventive tangents of meaning that the artist wove through the use of single letters.  Michael White’s essay on Kurt Schwitters also demonstrates experimentation with fragmented texts, images and even colours to create layers of meaning.

Michael Corris draws the reader’s attention to the importance of conceptual art and the mass media.  Artists since 1945 have explored the different power structures that inhabit the images and texts that surround us.  Stephen Barber, Rex Butler, Laurence Simmons, Barbara Weyandt and Hamza Walker contribute the next four essays, each taking an artist whose work contains prominent text.  Through the paintings of Austrian artist, August Walla, Barber argues that the crowded, painted surfaces and words try to deny a history and articulate a framework to protect their creator, who suffered from psychiatric illness. 

Coming to terms with their place in the world, artists Colin McCahon and Horst Haack expressed Christian faith and fear through their works.  The former used a patchwork of quotations, which seem to provide the artist with the authority to speak through his works.  Haack’s chilling Apocalypse (1999) is a postmodern reworking of the apocalyptic subject matter of mediaeval stained glass, but there is no trace of humour in the collage of violent images, many instantly recognizable and culled from the mass media.  Raymond Pettibon, the subject of the final essay in this volume, produced a form of counter-culture comic book art during the 1970s and ’80s in which word and image had equally important roles in accentuating the artist’s irony.

Although advertised as a 2,000-year history of word and image, the opening chapters are simply a prelude to the much more detailed essays on 20th-century artistic practice.  Despite a misleading title, this is an attractive and thought-provoking publication.  Especially noteworthy is the treatment of the works of outsider artists, such as August Walla, which may well pave the way for further thematic examinations of contemporary art.

This book is aimed primarily at an academic readership, but those with an interest in twentieth-century art will find several of the seven essays a fascinating exploration of how artists in the modern world have employed text in their work.

Art, Word and Image: 2,000 Years of Visual/Textual Interaction  by John Dixon Hunt, David Lomas and Michael Corrisis published by Reaktion Books, 2010. 416 pp., 324 colour and 61 mono illus. ISBN 978-1-86189-745-9