Cultivating Picturacy: Visual Art and Verbal InterventionsThough English has no word for the visual counterpart to literacy, Heffernan argues that the capacity to interpret pictures must be cultivated and deserves a name: picturacy. Using examples such as the pre-historic cave paintings of Lascaux, film versions of Frankenstein, the provocative photographs of Sally Mann, and the abstract canvases of Gerhard Richter, the volume illustrates how learning to decode the language of pictures resembles the process of learning to read. While words typically frame and regulate our experience of art, the study also explains how pictures can contest the authority of the words we use to interpret art. |
Contents
Introduction | 1 |
Literacy and Picturacy How Do We Learn to Read Pictures? | 11 |
Speaking for Pictures The Rhetoric of Art Criticism | 39 |
Alberti on Apelles Word and Image in De Pictura | 69 |
Text and Design Blakes Songs of Innocence and of Experience | 83 |
Marginal Language Word and Image in Blakes Visions of the Daughters of Albion | 101 |
Painting against Poetry Reynoldss Discourses and the Discourse of Turners Art | 115 |
Wordsworth Constable and the Poetics of Chiaroscuro | 141 |
Looking at the Monster Frankenstein and Film | 179 |
Love Death and Grotesquerie Beardsleys Illustrations of Wilde and Pope | 201 |
Hockney Remakes Hogarth A Gay Rake Progresses to America | 231 |
Peter Miltons Turn An American Printmaker Marks the End of a Millennium | 253 |
Reza Pollock Richter Language and Abstract Art | 287 |
Notes | 311 |
373 | |
397 | |