Works of art that are composed of both image and text create a layer of complexity that can challenge our understanding, and this interpretive difficulty extends into the process of curation. Questions of who made the work arise: was it more than one artist? What is the combination of image and text trying to achieve for the viewer? This essay will be concerned with the question of what happens to a visual work of art when a text is made to accompany the work, and is therefore demanding of equal viewing and equal contemplation. The reverse is also questioned here: what happens, when an image is made to accompany a text? Many examples come to mind, but this essay will look at two similar but very distinct works of art.[i]
In 1952, Cy Twombly (1928-2011) created a woodcut Song of the Border Guard for the poem by Robert Duncan (1919-1988). Duncan’s poetry is filled with blurred distinctions of metaphor and literal meaning much like the way some artists go about creating a visual work of art. The rhythm of poetry and language holds similar urgency to the rhythm the eye takes while reading the visual language the art holds. While reading a poem, the imagination of the reader is given complete freedom to illustrate the words on the page that the writer has placed for them, allowing them to make their own image in their mind. When looking at a work of visual art with no words or text guiding thought, the viewer is then given the freedom of their imagination to make their own visual rhyme and rhythm, to draw intellectual conclusions based on the juxtaposition of brush strokes, to make their own version of visual poetry, whatever it may be.
However, this work by Twombly and Duncan is an example of when image and text go together, yet remain on separate planes and don’t quite interact with each other on a physical level. The conversation that evolves between two different mediums is an interesting dialogue to consider when analyzing a work or works by two different artists. It makes one want to question: what if the artists reversed roles, if the painter wrote a poem and the poet painted? This moment does occur when there is only one artist at work; they take on the infusion of their own words and their own images and apply it to one composition. However, I am fascinated not only with the collaboration of image and text, but the collaboration with two separate artists coming together to create one work for viewers to read and see. Inevitably, one wonders if the genesis of each artist’s contribution began with the same thought?
The next work to contemplate is much more intimate. It is the book A Toute Épreuve written by Paul Éluard (1895-1952) and illustrated by Joan Miró (1893-1983), published in 1958. It is extremely playful, from the rhyme scheme of the words to the bright colors of the woodcuts that fill each page. The way the words, written in French, sound to the ear and look on the page, varying in size, style and color, compliment Miró’s use of color and shapes in the illustrations. It does not come across as an illustrated poem but the illustrations tell a story as well, and it doesn’t seem that the text is there to define the prints but to work together to accomplish the same goal. So why is this—and are there more examples of this moment when text becomes its own image and images become its own narrative? There are countless, surely, but next time you look at a work of art with both image and text, check and see if you are reading it differently than other works of art.
Written by Sophie Morris, 2014
[i] The sources for this essay have included a wide range of methodologies and approaches. See: Kathryn Porter, Aichele. Paul Klee, poet/painter (Rochester: Camden House, 2006); Nicholas Cullinan, Katharina Schmidt, and Xavier F. Salomon. Twombly and Poussin: Arcadian Painters, (London: Dulwich Picture Gallery ,2011); John Dixon Hunt and David Lomas, Art, word and image: two thousand years of visual/textual interaction,, (London: Reaktion, 2010); William Moritz, Optical poetry: the life and work of Oskar Fischinge, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004); Irma A. Richter and Jean Paul Richter, Selections from the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci,, (London: Oxford University Press, 1952); Karel Srp, Lenka Bydžovská, Alison de Lima Greene, and Jan Mergl. New formations: Czech avant-garde art and modern glass from the Roy and Mary Cullen collection, (Houston: Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2011); Alfred North Whitehead, Symbolism, its meaning and effect, (New York: Capricorn Books, 1959).
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