ABSTRACT
The first volume of Word & Image featured an essay by Ernst Gombrich on ‘Image and word in twentieth-century art’, which focused on the relation between works of art and their titles. In his introduction, Gombrich recalls the ‘ideal of purity’ that has dominated traditional approaches to the history of art, a purity that entails ‘the freedom of the image from the intrusion or indeed the contamination of words’. 1 He points out that while Cubist collages incorporated words they did so in an integrated visual form, for ‘the main point of collage is after all that we do not attend to the words but to the form’. Words that have a specific meaning are associated with ‘the servitude to ulterior aims of commerce or entertainment that characterized the mixed media of advertisements or of comics. The very success of these devices made them suspect. The image needed the word and the word the image as if they could not manage on their own.’ 2 Thus a more equal relationship between word and image, in which each contributes to the meaning of the work, is perceived as one of inter-dependence in which each part is weak and unable to exist alone.
