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


John Dixon Hunt, David Lomas and Michael Corris

Art, Word and Image examines the use of words (or language) in art – most often painting. This book asks what it means when a painting is ‘invaded’ by language - how do the two forms converse and combine, and what messages are intended for the viewer? Whether the picture frame is encroached upon by doodlings, as with Adolf Wolfli’s seemingly irrational scribbles, or a plea to spirituality is blazoned across a vast canvas, as in the moving images of Colin McCahon, we can be sure that words here have a special meaning, one beyond normal language and communication.

Art, Word and Image is constructed around three wide-ranging essays by
John Dixon Hunt, David Lomas and Michael Corris. The essays chart the use and significance of words in art – from Classical Greece and Assyria, through to the middle Ages and the Renaissance, to modern times and today’s digital media, and moreover the questions this intersection poses for contemporary artists. These essays deal with a variety of movements and artists including the Pre-Raphaelites, Duchamp, Picasso, Ernst, Twombly, Michaux and Warhol. The volume also includes ‘spotlight’ essays on artists whose work engages substantially with questions of Word and Image: Blake, Klee, Schwitters, Haack, Pettibon, McCahon and Walla.

This ground-breaking volume will form a new framework for thinking about the interactions between Art, Word, and Image in the future.

John Dixon Hunt is Professor of the History and Theory of Landscape at the University of Pennsylvania. He is editor of the journal Word and Image, and author of many books including Nature Over Again: The Garden Art of Ian Hamilton Finlay (Reaktion Books, 2008).

David Lomas is Reader in Art History at the School of Arts, Histories and Cultures, University of Manchester. He is the author of The Haunted Self: Surrealism, Psychoanalysis and Subjectivity (2000).

Michael Corris is Professor of Art and Chair of the Division of Art at SMU, Dallas, Texas. He was a member of the Conceptual art group 'Art & Language' in New York in the 1970s, and is is the author of Ad Reinhardt (Reaktion, 2008).

Art, Word and Image

280 x 210 mm
416 pages
385 illustrations, 324 in colour

Hardback
978 1 86189 520 2
May 2010
£35.00

Other books by this author:

Ad Reinhardt
The Afterlife of Gardens
Nature Over Again