CategoriesArtistic Disciplines
Written Word
Art in which words, letters and text are the main material, from calligraphy and illuminated script to concrete poetry and conceptual art.
No works indexed yet · 10 related artists
No open-access works for Written Word are in the index yet. They will appear here as more collections are indexed.
About
Writing has long been an art in itself, in Chinese calligraphy, Arabic script and illuminated Gospel books. In modern Europe, text entered pictures more directly. Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque stencilled letters into Cubist paintings around 1911, and Futurist poets scattered words across the page in varied type.
From the 1950s, concrete poets arranged words as visual shapes: Augusto de Campos in São Paulo and E. M. de Melo e Castro in Portugal treated the page as a field. The Dutch poet-painter Lucebert moved easily between the two arts, and in Argentina Edgardo Antonio Vigo made visual poems and mail art. Conceptual artists of the 1960s and 1970s often used language alone, as in Jenny Holzer's Truisms, printed on posters and later run on electronic signs. Manuscripts by writers such as Emily Dickinson, whose late poems survive on scraps and envelopes, are also studied for their visual form.
