Image and word in twentieth-century art

Abstract Abstract The relation between images and words, between works of art and their captions or titles, has undergone many changes in the history of art, but only in the twentieth century did it become a problem, for here it touched on one of the dominant concerns of the period- the ideal of purity and the constant search for a renewal of this ideal through the breaking offormer taboos. 1 This paper was originally given at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York in October I980 as the first of the annual Hilla Rebay lectures intended to examine 'significant problems in the theory, history and criticism of the visual arts in the twentieth century'. The theme I selected for this purpose, that of the titles of works of art, seemed to me at that time unduly neglected. The only relevant literature I found was the catalogue of the Exhibition Schrifl und Bild at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (1963) by Dietrich Mahlow; as often happens others had also noticed the lacuna and there are more discussions of the topic by now, the most recent to come to my knowledge being John Fisher, 'Entitling', Critical Inquiry, II, (I984), pp. 286-298. To refer to them all in the text, however, would have destroyed the character of a piece specifically written for the occasion. I should like to thank Alice Leslie for her help in preparing the paper for publication.