‘Schrift und Bild’: Sources and Perspectives of Verbovisuality in a Forgotten Exhibition of the Sixties

Abstract

In 1963, at Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum and Baden-Baden’s Staatlichen Kunsthalle, was set up an exhibition significantly titled Schrift und Bild. This exhibition, conceived by Dietrich Mahlow, then director of Baden-Baden’s Kunsthalle, was a vaste investigation about the intimate link between two communicative and expressive levels, writing and image, often considered by Western thought as separate worlds. While Mallarmé was recognized as the inventor of the first «poem-object», Klee appeared as a key figure. Throughout a non-linear path, the materials exhibited ranged from ancient sources to medieval miniatures, from 15-16^th Century printed books to oriental and Islamic calligraphy, to Cubist, Futurist and Constructivist compositions and texts by Apollinaire and Schwitters, passing through Lettrism, Concrete Poetry and Informal sign, finally arriving at a complex and varied constellation of contemporary artists who frequently resorted to contamination and combination of word and image. Presenting a great number of historical artists, Arabian and Japanese calligraphers and more than a hundred of artists born between the 1910s and 1920s, the exhibition was really impressive. Above all, it stood (deserving a careful critical review) as one of the first attempts to focus and historicize a verbovisual artistic research, which in the early 1960s was experiencing a happy season.