Véronique Plesch – Images and Words

I must confess that as I sit down to write this issue’s “Art Historical Musings,” I am quite daunted, to say the least. This is different from the trepidation I usually experience when I write (in my introduction to the 2025 Winter issue on Stuck! I shared the turmoil that befalls me and how I reassure and encourage myself). In this case, instead of the paralyzing anxiety of a blank page, my apprehensiveness comes from knowing far too much of a topic that has been central to my scholarly work for over thirty years.

In 1992, I came across a call for papers for a conference organized by the International Association of Word and Image Studies (IAWIS) and decided to submit an abstract. When I attended the conference that was held in Ottawa the following summer, I felt I had found an intellectual home: until then, I had been torn between studying literature or art, and the very existence of this scholarly association offered me the permission to pursue them both and even combine them. From then on, this remained a steady concern in my academic life and fifteen years later, I became IAWIS’s president and went on to hold this position for three terms. As MAJ’s readers might have noticed, my interests and tastes are quite varied, but the field of word and image studies is the common thread that runs through my eclectic pursuits.

The exploration of the relationships between words and images goes back to the Ancient World, summarized in Horace’s Latin phrase “ut pictura poesis,” “as is painting, so is poetry.” The question of whether painting and poetry can be compared is at the heart of a foundational text, Laocoon: or, The Limits of Poetry and Painting, published in 1766 by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, who argues that “painting uses completely different means or signs than does poetry, namely figures and colors in space rather than articulated sounds in time.”

Although in our age of time-based media we might need to revise this statement (not to mention the fact that any text, even in the disembodied digital medium, has a visual dimension and thus exists in space), Lessing addresses crucial issues, for instance, when he likens the two forms of expression to “equitable and friendly neighbors” and thus underscores their fundamental alterity.  He even goes on to evoke the “slight aggressions” that might occur at their borders, suggesting that their interactions are not always harmonious. More recently, scholars have furthered this metaphor, such as W.J.T. Mitchell for whom words and images are like two countries speaking different languages or Mieke Bal, who sees them engaging in a “war of signs.” Even if others prefer to envision this relationship in more peaceful terms (John Dixon Hunt, for one, speaks of fabric and of dance), one cannot deny that there have been times in history when such tensions have come to a head, such as the Byzantine iconoclastic crisis of the 6th century or the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century, when the verbal had the upper hand and images were destroyed.

The word/image pair fits into a series of dichotomies, such as male and female, day and night, life and death, in which the first entity holds a positive valence and the second a negative one. The practice of word and images studies casts light on such biases and adds a critical dimension to our understanding of artworks and of practices that we often take for granted. Take the action of describing artworks: this requisite step in any art writing represents a rather impossible goal as it rests upon the premise that verbal and visual expressions are equivalent. Furthermore, according to Marjorie Munsterberg, description involves “two separate acts of translation. The first transforms a visual experience into a verbal one and the second turns a private experience into one that can be communicated to someone else.” And yes, as the Italians remind us, translation is treacherous—traduttore, traditore (translator, traitor)!

Still, no matter how unattainable this goal might be, description is a crucial preamble to assessing a work of art. Besides establishing a common ground between the person who produces the analysis and the audience, a verbal description makes one see better. As a side note: I have often said that the other activity that affords an intimate understanding of a visual object is sketching. Both actions require the beholder to take the time to focus and actively engage with the object—thinking is involved. This is why Sherlock Holmes scolds Watson: “you see but do not observe.” Active seeing is not innate; it is a critical and analytical process. Thus French essayist Charles Péguy reminds us that “[o]ne must always say what one sees. Above all, one must always, which is more difficult, see what one sees” (“Il faut toujours dire ce que l’on voit. Surtout il faut toujours, ce qui est plus difficile, voir ce que l’on voit”; this statement, which can be applied to art historical description, appears in Peguy’s memoir Notre jeunesse as he discusses the Dreyfus Affair and its effect on French politics).

Just like descriptions, titles are a verbal expression grafted onto a visual object. Because of their ubiquity, we tend to take them for granted and to overlook their motivations and implications and yet, attentive scrutiny yields illuminating insights. Every word deserves attention—even articles, as is the case for Gustave Courbet’s famous Un enterrement à Ornans. Despite the great precision in the depiction of the setting (in the background we recognize the distinctive relief of the artist’s native area in North-Eastern France) and of the cast of characters (with the different types of inhabitants from a mid-19th-century provincial town), Courbet chose to title the work “A burial,” and thus to stress the event’s generic nature.

We have to wait until the 17th and 18th centuries to see artists titling their works, a new trend reflected in the livret (“little book”) accompanying the Parisian periodic public exhibition known as the Salon (named after the rooms in the Louvre palace where such art shows were held early on). As François-Joseph Heim’s painting shows, the walls were tightly packed with the artworks (hence our modern term of “salon hanging”), making a checklist with titles an indispensable tool for the visitor.

From then on, titles became an integral aspect of the work, an additional creative step performed by the artist. And yes, “Untitled” is a title. (I like to think of it as a verbal equivalent to unframed canvases with both underscoring the artwork’s “thingness.”) This approach is in stark contrast to earlier “titles,” which were essentially descriptive in nature (conveying the work’s subject matter, origin, and/or location: The Crucifixion, The Venus de Milo, etc.) and given after the fact.

Words in Art

Verbo-visual interactions also occur when letterforms, words, and entire texts appear within works of visual art. Take the words spoken by depicted figures in medieval and Renaissance art. At times enclosed in a scroll (the ancestor of our modern comics’ speech bubbles) or written right on the painting’s surface, they represent direct speech. They also, if we think in Lessing’s terms, introduce a temporal dimension to what is in effect a snapshot. If the participants’ gestures are frozen in what photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson would famously call the “decisive moment,” the words exchanged expand the event’s duration. In Jan van Eyck’s Annunciation, we see the words being uttered: gold letters next to Gabriel’s mouth spell out his message, “Ave gratia plena” (hail [Mary] full of grace), to which the Virgin responds, “Ecce ancilla domini” (behold the handmaiden of the Lord). Remarkably, Mary’s acquiescence is written upside down and thus achieves two clever tricks, allowing the words to extend from her mouth towards the archangel while also making them readable by—and thus addressed to—God.

In Cubism, Futurism, and Dadaism words are present, often the result of collaged materials culled from the “real” world. Just like the multiple points of view that are combined in this still life by Juan Gris, words contribute to convey modern life’s cacophonic fragmentation. In fact, German Dadaist Kurt Schwitters (see my Fall 2023 Musings in which I discuss a work by him) ended up naming his one-person artistic movement “Merz,” after a fragment of printed matter with “Kommerzbank” on it.

Words as Art

Across time and space, words (and their building blocks, letters) have been treated as art, carefully delineated by skilled scribes and decorated with rich materials. Letters can even house depictions—this is what we call historiated initials. In a diminutive prayer book created by the leading illuminator at the time, Jean Pucelle, for the queen of France, the patron herself appears in a capital D. The text that follows, “Domine labia mea aperies” (“Thou O Lord wilt open my lips”), is the first verse of a prayer from the Office of the Virgin, recited at the early-morning canonical hour of Matins. Enclosed in the initial, Jeanne d’Evreux kneels and holds an open prayer book in her hands, suggesting that her fervent devotion produced the vision of the Annunciation that appears above.

Besides housing depictions, letters might even be made up of figures. A 12th-century Cistercian manuscript of moral commentaries on the Old Testament Book of Job by Pope Gregory I opens on a letter written by Gregory “to the most reverend brother Leander.” The initial R of “Reverentissimo” is formed by a knight and a squire slaying a dragon-like creature. The image might delight the reader for its wit, but it also communicates a weighty message. In the medieval world, hybrid creatures symbolized sin and this monster is being vanquished by a knight whose erect posture embodies moral rectitude.

Over three centuries later, in a book of Hours commissioned by Charles d’Angoulême, illuminator Robinet Testard displayed the same inventiveness when assembling humans and animals to spell out the beginning of the Ave Maria (the page reads: “Ave Maria gratia plena”). The appeal of such figural alphabets is enduring as proven by countless children’s books: for instance, in the 1990s, William Wegman enlisted his beloved Weimaraners to create the entire alphabet (Wegman took the photos in 1993–94, published a book in 1994, and made this video.)

As letters are embellished, inhabited, or morph into images, their legibility is compromised. The tension between calligraphic elaboration and legibility is central to a type of graffiti called “wildstyle,” which appeared around 1980 and remains widespread in our cities today. Gabrielle Gopinath notes that wildstyle graffiti’s characteristic illegibility is the result of exaggerated letterforms, which possess “kinetic energy.” Wildstyle is indeed characterized by boundless dynamism: in words that more often than not appear on car trains in motion, arrows are frequent and letters collide as if subjected to a crash. In this “over-the-top” style, “convoluted” forms turn words into “entities endowed with volition,” and riotous colors give the ensemble the feel of carnivalesque performance. As Aubrey Adkins argued last spring in a paper she wrote for my seminar on graffiti, wildstyle’s illegibility subverts the city’s legibility (think about Manhattan’s rational grid) and, as Gopinath argues, it simultaneously excludes those who cannot decipher it while defining a subculture.

Whether letters house images, are formed by images, or become images, the visual gets in the way of an easy deciphering of the verbal, thus bringing us back to the word/image binary and to their often-agonistic relationship. At one end of the legibility/illegibility spectrum, we find artwork that contain elements resembling text but whose meaning cannot be accessed: what scholars call “asemic writing.” Cy Twombly’s scribble-like marks that allude to letters and numbers and yet remain cryptic come to mind. Similarly, the Argentine Mirtha Dermisache produced works that appear to be handwritten and printed texts until closer inspection reveals their asemic nature.

Writing about Twombly, Richard Shiff asks: “‘Would we notice a mark as an independent mark within a visual field if it were not that we had decided it must signify something?’” (Shiff’s emphasis). Meaning is the crux of the matter. I am reminded of Abby Shahn’s fascination for what she calls “bug writing,” the marks made by insects under trees’ bark that appear like mysterious texts (see my interview of Abby in the Fall 2020 issue of MAJ). Dermisache’s first museum retrospective, held posthumously at the Latin American Art Museum of Buenos Aires (MALBA) in 2017, was revealingly titled “Mirtha Dermisache: Porque ¡yo escribo!” (“Mirtha Dermisache: Because I Write!”). As early as 1971, French critic Roland Barthes dubbed Dermisache’s work “illegible writings.” In an online article for MoMA, Fernando Bruno reproduces the letter dated 28 March 1971 that Barthes sent the Argentine artist, in which he declares that

Vous avez su produire un certain nombre de formes, ni figuratives, ni abstraites, que l’on pourrait ranger sous le nom d’écriture illisible—ce qui revient à proposer à vos lecteurs, non point les messages ni même les formes contingentes de l’expression, mais l’idée, l’essence de l’écriture.” (Barthes’s emphasis)

You were able to produce a certain number of forms, neither figurative nor abstract, that could be classified as illegible writing—which amounts to proposing to your readers, not messages or even contingent forms of expression, but the idea, the essence of writing. (Barthes’s emphasis)

As writing becomes asemic, it is reduced to a mark and distilled to its essence. Thus, writing becomes drawing and in so doing transcends the word/image binary.

In Guy Williams’s Poems for Painters word and images also coalesce, but in a completely different manner. Published in 1963 in a small run of 200 copies and again in 1974 with enlarged and slightly different contents, the book consists of what Williams, who was primarily a visual artist, called “typewriter drawings.” In these verbo-visual ekphrases, letters and typographic signs are arranged to reproduce the visual aspect of works by contemporary visual artists. Each of them is identified by the artist’s last name, placed at the bottom of the facing page, which otherwise is left empty. Except in rare cases, the “poems” aim at capturing the essence of each artist’s art rather than a specific work. For instance, in the “poem” reproduced on the cover, “Reinhardt,” five letters (B, L, A, C, and K, both in upper and lower-case, sometimes spelling “black”) are laid out in a manner that mimics Ad Reinhardt’s geometric abstractions.

In a forthcoming essay, I suggest that Poems for Painters are at once text and illustration. Binaries are structured according to hegemonic hierarchies, and, given our fundamentally logocentric culture (just think about the opening verse of the Gospel of John: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God”), the images we traditionally refer to as “illustration” are thought to fulfil a function ancillary to the text (but many of us are dedicated to prove it otherwise: see the book of collected essays in which my essay will appear). In many of the works mentioned here, binaries are dismantled.  Much is to be gained from refusing to oppose them and instead creatively merging them.

 

References

Bal, Mieke. Reading Rembrandt: Beyond the Word-Image Opposition. Cambridge University Press, 1991. Quote is on p. 47.

Bruno, Fernando. “On Language and Its Limits: The Illegible Writings of Mirtha Dermisache.” MoMA: postnotes in a global context 14 November 2018.

Dixon Hunt, John. “The Fabric and the Dance: Word and Image to 1900.” Art, Word and Image. Ed. John Dixon Hunt, David Lomas, and Michael Corris. London: Reaktion Press, 2010. 35–85.

Doyle, Arthur Conan. The Sign of the Four, A Scandal in Bohemia, and Other Stories. New York, A. L. Burt, 1900. Quote is on p. 171.

Horace. Satires, Epistles and Ars Poetica Trans. H. Rushton Fairclough. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1929. Quote is on l. 361.

Gopinath, Gabrielle. “Ornament as Armament: Playing Defense in Wildstyle Graffiti.” In Understanding Graffiti. Ed. Troy Lovata and Elizabeth Olton. Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press, 2015. 117–28. Quotes are on pp. 117 and 121.

Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry. Trans. Edward Allen McCormick. Indianapolis and New York: The Bobbs-Merril Company, 1962. Quotes are on pp. 78 and 91.

Mitchell, W.J.T. “Word and Image.” In Critical Terms for Art History. Ed. R.S. Nelson and R. Shiff. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1985. 51-61. Quote is on p. 48.

Munsterberg, Marjorie. “Visual Description.” Writing About Art. 2009.

Peguy, Charles. Notre Jeunesse. Paris: Cahiers de la quinzaine, 1910. Quote is on p. 194. English: “Memories of Youth.” Trans. Alexander Dru. In Temporal and Eternal. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1958. Unfortunately, this is an “adaptation” of writings by Péguy and doesn’t contain the section with this quote; hence my own translation. Thanks to my dear colleague, Martine Hennard Dutheil de la Rochère, for this quote. I cannot resist noting a remarkable—and moving—coincidence. As I write this essay, I learned that on 6 November 2025 the French Senate unanimously voted to posthumously elevate Dreyfus to the grade of Général de brigade (brigadier general).

Plesch, Véronique. “Illustration Unbound: Crafting Books with Words and Images.” In Illustration Studies: New Approaches, New Directions. Ed. Christina Ionescu and Ann Lewis. Nancy, France: PUN – Éditions Universitaires de Lorraine. Forthcoming.

Shiff, Richard. “Reality by Chance,” Brooklyn Rail, October 2019.

Wegman, William. ABC, New York: Hyperion Books for Children, 1994.

Williams, Guy. Poems for Painters, La Jolla, CA: I Gallery, 1963 / San Diego: Stooge, 1974. I am grateful to Kevin O’Connor for introducing me to Williams’s Poems for Painters.