Every picture tells a story: such at least was the general supposition until the advent of a deliberately abstract ideal of painting in modern times. It is important to emphasize at the outset that the relationship between the visual and the verbal arts has been founded for the greater part of its history on a common concern with communicating: that is, with providing a socially based set of conventions for conveying ideas or images. One could go further and suggest that a great deal of the activity which the arts shared in common might be summarized under the heading of narration, of telling a story and telling it vividly. These claims will be examined in detail in a moment; for the present it will be useful to stick with the issue of representation in the arts. It is a safe generalization that the history of formal techniques in verbal and in visual art can be given in three stages: innovation, popularization, rejection. Those artists and writers who turned away in the early years of the twentieth century from conventional modes of expression in favour of ‘modernism’ or experiment frequently claimed to be motivated by a concern for the freedom and creative independence of their art. They viewed the conventional expectations popularized during the previous century by growing literacy and by the development of the lithograph as a threat to creative originality.