This book is the first attempt to chart the history of art and its interaction with written language. Art, Word and Image examines the use of words (or language) in many genres of art – most often painting, but including prints, the book as art, sculpture, installation, and performance. This book asks what does it mean when a painting is ‘invaded’ by language? How do the two forms converse and combine, and what messages are intended for the viewer? In addition, other important themes that are also addressed include the naming or titling of paintings, the uses of narrative in art, and the literary connections and aspirations of artists.
Art, Word and Image is constructed around three wide-ranging essays by John Dixon Hunt, David Lomas and Michael Corris. These essays discuss 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, where the words and image question has become a central issue. The essays cover a variety of movements (Pre-Raphaelites, Cubists, Surrealists, and Lettrists, for example) and many artists, among them Duchamp, Picasso, Ernst, Twombly, Michaux, Warhol and Kruger. The book 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 book will form a new framework for thinking about the interactions between word and image in the visual arts.
With contributions by Jeremy Adler, Stephen Barber, Rex Butler and Laurence Simmons, Michael Corris, John Dixon Hunt, Michael R. Leaman, David Lomas, Joseph Viscomi, Hamza Walker, Barbara Weyandt and Michael White.
David Lomas is Professor of Art History at the University of Manchester and the author of The Haunted Self: Surrealism, Psychoanalysis, Subjectivity (2000) and, with Michael Corris and John Dixon Hunt, Art, Word and Image: 2,000 Years of Visual/Textual Interaction (Reaktion, 2010).
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 editor of Conceptual Art: Theory, Myth, and Practice (2003), and author (with David Diao) of David Diao: Works 1969-2005 (2006). As well as Ad Reinhardt (Reaktion, 2008).
John Dixon Hunt is Emeritus Professor of the History and Theory of Landscape at the University of Pennsylvania. His previous books include The Wider Sea: A Life of John Ruskin (1992) and The Making of Place (Reaktion, 2015).
Preface by Michael R. Leaman
Introduction by John Dixon Hunt
I The Fabric and the Dance: Word and Image to 1900
John Dixon Hunt
1 Blake's Illuminated Word
Joseph Viscomi
II 'New in art, they are already soaked in humanity:' Word and Image 1900-1945
David Lomas
2 Paul Klee as 'Poet-Painter'
Jeremy Adler
3 Sense and Nonsense in Kurt Schwitters
Michael White
III Word and Image in Art since 1945
Michael Corris
4 August Walla: Devil/God, Image/Text
Stephen Barber
5 'The Sound of Painting:' Colin McCahon
Rex Butler and Laurence Simmons
6 Revelation in Image and Word: The Apocalypse according to Horst Haack
Barbara Weyandt
7 Raymond Pettibon: Words and Images
Hamza Walker
References
Contributors
Select Bibliogrpahy
Photo Acknowledgements
Index