by Jon Lackman | 29 October 2008 | Journals
The journal Word & Image, edited by John Dixon Hunt, made the unusual decision to turn over its entire July-September 2008 issue to two authors, Deborah Schultz and Edward Timms, who present their joint research on “Pictorial Narrative in the Nazi Period: Felix Nussbaum, Charlotte Salomon and Arnold Daghani,” “the findings of a three-year research project funded by the Leverhulme Trust,” which also underwrote “the cost of illustrations” for this special issue. In their introduction, the authors write:
The first volume of Word & Image featured an essay by Ernst Gombrich on ‘Image and word in twentieth-century art’ … 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’ … Such ideas came to dominate the theory and practice of the visual arts in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries … Only with regard to premodern art, untouched by the aesthetic and intellectual advances of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, did historians seriously engage with the concept of pictorial narrative. In early Christian art, it was conceded, narrative played an important role, construed primarily in didactic rather than aesthetic terms … We set out an alternative approach, presenting pictorial narrative not as a premodern resource for the simple-minded, but as an art of crisis that can be correlated with periods of ideological upheaval. Purity of form and harmony of perspective lend themselves to the portrayal of a hierarchical society and an ordered universe. But hybridity, the aesthetically impure mixing of media, reflects the breakdown of established authority and the implosion for new meanings.
