The British Word continued : R.B. Kitaj

The Wedding (1989-93)

If Not, Not (1975-76)

R.B. Kitaj’s work similarly exposes the artist as we look at the world through his tortured lens. Like Emin’s quilts and prints, it is an exposure done “in favour of vividness of feeling” (Morphet, 31). Kitaj is different from the other contemporary British artists discussed in that he does not always literally incorporate words into the visual compositions of his artwork. However, words, as with Turner, have such an influential effect on the way that he constructs his images that one cannot fail to acknowledge him in the British tradition of the word.

Kitaj paints vivid narratives through the tense, elaborate atmospheres that he creates. Indeed, his images not only show, but also tell a scene. Many a time Kitaj has accompanying texts to his work. His texts often function as narratives to the paintings, and are written in the style of a short story. He incorporated the word out of a “concern for clarity” and a “particularity about the content of a given work” (Morphet, 16). Indeed, Kitaj, as other artists, valued the word for its directness in articulating both his personal feelings and his commentary on social oppression. Such commentaries largely focus on the Holocaust, “references to texts written by victims of persecution” and sexual violence (Morphet, 13). Thus one sees the common pairing of the personal with the universal, which in turn often conflate. As Morphet articulates, he “respond[s] to the crisis of our century by means of works combining a sense of the tragic with unusual exposure of the self” (27). Indeed, Kitaj inevitably revealed his own torment in the often agitated forms and trembling paint that he used to depict his grim characters.

His images are in themselves wordy. Once again, they are in dialogue with Turner’s in that they are largely about their “aura” (Ashbery, quoted by Morphet, 28). This is greatly accomplished through the excess or absence of movement. For example, in Sighs from Hell (1979), one captures the tense, dreadful atmosphere in the women’s static gazes that appear to freeze the space they inhabit. This affinity for narrative picturing is in part due to an “obsession with the book,” out of which Kitaj pulls both imagery and text for his work (Morphet, 13). His painting If Not, Not, for instance, was done as an illustration to T.S. Eliot’s poem ‘The Wasteland.’ Once again, we see that British eagerness to lend a vision to a poem. In 2007 a book was compiled using this image to accompany the poem. “Like the poem, the painting can be taken apart” (Hoyem). And so, just as the poem is divided from page to page, the painting is isolated into several parts, only to be entirely “reproduced at the end of the poem” (Hoyem). Indeed, Kitaj’s painting is as layered in narrative and image as the poem itself, placing importance on the reading of the work. He treated images as he treated his words; he expected the viewer to decode the images as signs, to find a message in their aesthetics.

Kitaj encouraged what can be interpreted as a semiotic reading of his work, which he in turn facilitated with the use of plain language – both visually and literally. His subject matter is accessible: portraits, nudes, landscapes, urban streets, sports and domestic scenes. However, like a semiotician, he often manipulated such subjects: “ he include[d] the creation of new contexts for motifs originally of specific origin, [he adapted] pre-existing images by often disturbing distortion and [he invented] faces and figures” (Morphet, 10). In The Wedding, for instance, one is drawn to the grotesque, ghostly and trembling faces of the people surrounding the much smaller, hidden bride. Absorbed in a chaos of grim color and movement, celebration does not come to mind.

His texts take on a similar atmosphere. Morphet describes them as “unusual among serious art-related writing in the degree to which they are pervaded by the idioms of the speech of street, bar, workshop and sport stadium, as well as by those of mid-century film” (18-19). Kitaj’s use of language, as with the other artists, breaks from the more formal readings found in art criticism and the museum; indeed, he uses the word for plain communication.

The British Word continued...Tracey Emin

Terrebly wrong, 1997 (monoprint)

Terminal 1 (2000)

I do not expect to be a mother (2002)

Tracey Emin, to a similar effect, ironically employs a medium – the quilt – that appears to contradict its content – feminist and fierce remarks. In I do not expect to be a mother, confessional phrases in shouting capitals such as ‘i do not expect to be a mother but i expect to die alone’ and ‘it doesn’t have to be like this’ pierce the quilt. The painstaking process of sewing conveys the purposefulness of thought put into the messages. Yet the angry and pessimistic undertones belie the gentle and domestic connotations of sewing. Indeed, in Emin’s quilts, the words are the center of attention; they are valued for their directness, for their ability to forcefully deliver messages. Importantly though, it is the pairing of the words with the quilt image – the semiotic link of content to context – that creates the feminist and provocative tone of her works.

As with Hockney and other artists, Emin’s language is deeply personal, as she frequently draws on her own sexual experiences. However, in keep with another British trend, she includes a universal, socially critical aspect to her work: the commentary on male dominance and spectatorship. Her work gives a powerful voice to the female. Her use of the quilt alludes to the Suffragettes, who used “appliquéd texts and banners…in women’s…protests” (Betterton, 38). Thus even though Emin inscribes personal remarks, she appears to be making a larger gesture for her gender when she uses a form that is symbolically significant of both female subservience and defiance. This is made especially obvious in her piece, Terminal 1, which begins with several personal references to a relationship but ends on the firm note: ‘i am international woman.’

Emin’s monoprints likewise gain their meaning from the combination of aesthetics, medium and language. In a contemporary tradition, a close reading of the words’ aesthetics heightens the words’ literal message. In the monoprints, unlike the quilts, the words and images have a sketch-like, nearly illegible quality. The spectator struggles to make out the inversed lettering and crossed out words, and in so doing inevitably feels the frustration and difficulty in communication. As in sewing, the trace on the monoprint is difficult to remove and thus requires a conscious construction of words. However, Emin exposes her mistakes to a greater extent in the monoprints, leaving the spectator to feel “the apparent immediacy” in her words (Townsend, 82). Indeed, she aims for “people to see what was there before”; thus not only is there a sense of self-exposure, but there is also that British desire to be honest, and the more recent desire to be blunt with the viewer (Emin quoted by Wainwright, 202).

The British Word continued : David Hockney

The gospel singing (good people) Madison Square garden (1961-3)

Meeting the good people (Washington) (1961-63)

The drinking scene (1961-3)

Tea Painting in an Illusionistic Style (1961)

We Two Boys Together Clinging (1961)

Doll Boy (1961)




David Hockney’s work from the early sixties combines accessible, informal and sketchy graffiti marks with highly personal, layered and confessional content. The paintings visually mimic lavatorial graffiti– a space cluttered in energetic, messy imagery and words that require close reading. This graffiti aesthetic in turn enhances Hockney’s use of confessional language. In a semiotic lens, the words (or the “signifiers”) are given a greater meaning (“the signified”) once related to their context (the graffiti).

The language in these works often has the bluntness and crudeness characteristic of contemporary British art. As in the past, the words address social oppression, specifically as experienced by homosexuals. In Hockney’s piece Doll Boy, the words ‘doll boy’ appear to horizontally run into a male figure’s frail, tilted neck that precariously balances on his body, and may likely be decapitated by these derogatory words. Here, word and image importantly work to reinforce one another.

What makes these paintings different from actual graffiti, however, is that they have a uniform quality, an underlying narrative in their repeating themes of love, sexuality and oppression. One senses a singular personality in these works, which seemingly contradicts the fact that they mimic a public and anonymous form (graffiti). Thus, in a way, Hockney resembles the Romantics and other artists to be discussed in that he uses language in a self-expressive and introspective manner while, on some level, presenting the language as self-detached. Interestingly, Hockney often borrows segments from Wordsworth’s poems or poem titles, such as We Two Boys Together Clinging. The phrase crawls in between two embracing figures, giving verbal expression to their bond. Here, Hockney shows that British artistic desire to give vision to a poet’s words.

Though Hockney’s work has a critical and a torturous self-reflective quality, it nonetheless maintains the ironic, satirical humor characteristic of British art. Tea Painting in an Illusionistic Style uses the image of a ‘Typhoo Tea’ carton to ironically box up a figure seated on a toilet seat. Hockney, as past artists, in drawing from popular culture, makes his critique more accessible for and engages in dialogue with the public. He likewise maintains the roughness and sketchiness seen in his other works, furthering the distortion of a traditionally bright Pop art image. As Clothier puts it, there is here “a blend of high melodrama and absurdist humor” (20).

Hockney’s version of A Rake’s Progress uses Hogarth’s Rake series as a model, blending word and image in a similar satirical fashion to make social criticisms. However, while Hogarth’s A Rake’s Progress is clearly not a “progress,” the same cannot be assumed of Hockney’s. As Heffernan puts it, “Hockney’s picture playfully asks if homosexuality… means the end of England” (Cultivating Picturacy, 239). Hockney’s own answer to this question is an ironic ‘no.’ The rake is placed within situations that could be considered immoral or irresponsible, such as indulging in drinking, partying, frequenting gay venues and overspending. The series is thus about “the individual’s defining and redefining this self in time” (Joachim, 39). As Hogarth, Hockney incorporates the signage of the times in his depictions of public hangouts such as pubs and familiar references to music (gospel), public monuments (the capital) and campaign imagery.

At the end of the series, “unlike Hogarth’s rake, who is nearly prostrate in the final plate, Hockney’s rake ends up standing at attention” (Heffernan, 252). Thus Hockney ironically uses Hogarth’s plates to serve a contrary purpose – to show that so-called “immoral” attitudes are not so detrimental after all.

The British Word continued...

Though language in art is no longer monitored or dictated by an authority as in the past, it is nonetheless largely dominated by the museum and/or the critic. In his book Cultivating Picturacy, Heffernan, when referring to works that only deal with images, posits that images are not always “universally intelligible” and that they thus require the aid of words (16). This is partly why museums and art critics become “the verbal representative[s] of visual art,” for an “interpretive” language is used “[rhetorically]” to help tell viewers how and what to see (Heffernan, 44).

One observes – as in the work of David Hockney, Tracey Emin, R.B. Kitaj, Grayson Perry and Banksy– that British artists today have in part incorporated words into their artwork so that they can speak for themselves and can attempt to become “the verbal representative” of their own art. Whereas before artists rebelled against the language of the aristocracy, today artists battle with the language of the museum and the critic. Indeed, in discussing such language, Hockney describes it as largely estranging and inaccessible to the greater public, claiming that it likely sounds “a little like scholasticism…of no great relevance to [the public’s] own interest” (That’s the Way I See It, 150). Hockney withholds that in order to make art speak to the public (and not just a selective audience), one must at times reach out of the art world into a more plain language that describes art in a manner that “a person sees” (150).

Artists today, like Hogarth, frequently draw from popular culture and signage to both criticize it and to make their work relevant to the public. This is one of many instances where artists use plain, colloquial language in order to communicate more directly and honestly with their viewers – a trend traced back to artists and writers in the late eighteenth century.

Today, however, unlike in the past, the viewer, more often than not, has to struggle before making out the messages in the artworks. This is largely due to a trend to inscribe letters in a sketchy manner or in a style that suggests instantaneity. This way, the viewer has the impression that the words were not overwrought, that they flowed right off the artist’s hand in an honest, blunt and intimate manner. Alternatively, the words are deliberately constructed in a way that makes it difficult to read – the viewer understands it as a conscious effort, a deliberate obscuration. Or, as with Banksy, the words are sneakily blended into the environment. Thus, in all these cases, there is an initial moment of doubt; the viewer is not warned of the disturbing content that the words may withhold. Rather, the viewer must first pause and break through the works’ layers, a quality that again testifies to the semiotic nature of these artists’ work.

British art history reveals a common belief that the word helps bring accuracy and immediacy to narrative and self-expression. Whereas the word was first used in art as an authoritative tool, now it is used to speak against authority. Likewise, as the word became appropriated by the artist, it developed a satirical and increasingly accessible and personal character. Over time, the word has become more intertwined with the image so that the words themselves have become visual elements in the works; their aesthetics are just as powerful as their actual denotations. However, unlike in the past, the words today have a gutsy and informal visual quality, which in turn complements their content. The language of British art today, though in dialogue with the past, has taken on a distinctly more tortured and aggressive character.

The British Word continued...

British art underwent a change during the Victorian period by turning to moral narratives, realism and a fear of introspection. According to Graham-Dixon, “the rise to eminence of the art critic” coincides with a time when people wanted “to have [artworks’] narratives explicated and their moral meaning teased out” (Graham-Dixon, 166). Victorian art criticism likewise developed “the argument of ‘ut picture poesis,’” where the art critic approached a picture by translating it into prose (295, Hewison). The image in itself, without poetical explication, was considered less valuable. Furthermore, it was not the actual pictorial detailing or the technique that was explored; rather, several critics “[concentrated] upon an explanation of [the] subject” (Althoz). Thus the word was considered a higher art for its poetical ability and a more direct art in its efficacy in delivering a subject. Though images are no longer disregarded as such, we shall later see that the language in art criticism and in museums is still in large part considered to dictate artworks.

During the same period, there arose an interest in structuralist semiotics, which paid attention to the organization of words. Ferdinand de Saussure, the great figure of this semiotic line of thought, introduced the notion of the “signifier” (the word) and the “signified” (the concept). He claimed that a word could only gain its concept or meaning when related to its context or to the other words that it modifies. Saussure realized that words’ meanings are an automatic, instinctual process, which he justified with the claim that “each [linguistic sign] is recognized over and over again to be the ‘same’ sign because it has the same set of relations to other signs” (Bredin, 68). What Saussure, and other semioticians, aimed to do was to slow down our instincts by breaking down linguistic signs. Words became interpretative forms, and with this came a consciousness of the weaving of words and what they are made to do.

Moving into the twentieth century to this day, modern semiotics further elaborates on the role of the reader in its analyses. It asks why we make the immediate associations that we do with certain words. It tends to answer such questions around the belief that “signs are related to their signifieds by social conventions which we learn” (Chandler). In inspecting these social conventions, semioticians emphasize the fabricated nature of linguistic signs. Their goal is to often “denaturalize signs, texts and codes [to] demonstrate that ‘reality’ can be challenged” (Chandler). Thus modern semiotics interrogates the contexts out of which words’ concepts arise, as opposed to simply acknowledging them.

Several British artists today incorporate language in their work with the same consciousness of a semiotician. In the Victorian period, words were valued for their ability to explicate moral messages. Today, artists similarly take advantage of the word’s directness; however, they explore further by giving importance to the process of the reading of an artwork, of how the words are visually organized. Like a semiotician, artists today have developed a layered reading to their work.

This concern for close reading, however, can be traced back to the very work of Hogarth, where one must delve into the prints to find the copious messages and ironic pairings of images and words before fully comprehending the criticism. Like Hogarth, these artists make it so that their words interact with, and are not necessarily superior to, other visual elements within the overall oeuvre. The artists’ words, the “signifiers,” develop a richer meaning once related to their neighboring visual elements, or their context, the “signified.”

In the contemporary artwork that will be discussed, some artists place words within contexts where they would usually belong so as to enrich and facilitate the viewer’s understanding of the language. Other artists, though, may challenge the way in which we are accustomed to reading by placing words within new or unusual contexts. They explore the social constructs of what is considered ‘allowed’ language and ‘not allowed’ language. The reader is forced to rearrange his/her visual and verbal associations. Several artists, particularly Grayson Perry and Banksy, further respond to a notion implied in the study of semiotics: “If signs do not merely reflect reality but are involved in its construction then those who control the sign systems control the construction of reality” (Chandler). These artists attempt to debunk such associations, attacking those who construct reality, which include the tabloids, media, government and art establishments.

Thus, as in the past, contemporary artists still make social commentary, particularly in regard to authorities and social oppression. Importantly, most of the artists’ criticism, though serious, maintains the satirical and humorous undertones that have been the historical trademarks in British art.

The British Word continued...

J.M.W. Turner, The Slave Ship (1840)

J.M.W. Turner, a contemporary of Wordsworth, greatly drew from Romantic poetry in his artwork. Turner particularly appreciated the manner in which words captured atmosphere, such as in Scottish poet James Thomsons’s “The Seasons.” Turner is said to have depicted “the sunrise…such as he imagined was in the poet’s eye” (Timbs, 365). Not only did he use Romantics’ poetry but he also used his own poetry to accompany his paintings. His writing was something personally significant that helped him to refine his vision and emotions on nature and the sublime (Nadaner). Words, however, by no means took precedent over his images; rather, much like the British art today, each complemented and enriched the other. In 1812, Turner addressed the Royal Academy in a lecture: “Painting and poetry flow from the same fount mutually by vision, …[and] reciprocally…heighten each other’s beauties like…mirrors” (Nadaner, 32). Turner’s paintings and poetry work together to grasp and convey that which cannot be seen but that is inexplicably felt in a setting’s atmosphere.

In expressing his subliminal emotions and visions, Turner placed value on individual experience, as Wordsworth and other Romantic poets did. During this period, the emphasis on the individual in turn inspired a concern for political and social causes. Turner extended his work from personal reflections to “sublime or awesome aspects of contemporary life” in general, such as in his work on the terrifying travels of slave ships (Barker). Thus the early nineteenth century saw trends that resemble today’s. Both periods have artists intertwine images with words to express emotion to its fullest, to connect to one’s inner self. Yet these artists also reach out of themselves to address universal concerns, particularly in regard to social oppression.

The British Word from Hogarth to Today: A Desire to Tell, Not Show

William Hogarth, A Rake's Progress, Plate 3, 1735 (taken from the BBC)

It's been a while since I haven't posted any of my art-related essays, and I recently got inspired to rummage through my old essays. During my sophomore year at Barnard I took a great seminar with Simon Schama on Contemporary British Art. In that seminar, I wrote a paper on the relationship of words and images in British art throughout history. Since it's a bit on the longer side, I'll post this one day by day, and hopefully I'll keep you interested! :


The history of British art reveals an affinity for incorporating words in artworks, particularly in the form of narrative. Beginning with the Reformation period, there prevailed what Graham-Dixon terms a sense of “anti-art,” where the image was thought to deceive, while the word had the virtue of introducing a clear narrative or message (218). These beliefs sprung from a Protestant perspective, which feared that “the supernatural can never be made manifest in the likeness of a figure” (42). The essential belief behind this statement – that words can communicate more directly than images – remains relevant to this day in British art.

As Graham-Dixon describes it, in the Post-Reformation period, “words did not replace images, they incorporated them in a different way. Language was to summon up all the pictures that had been destroyed” (53). With this, there developed a trend in British art where images became often verbal, and literature, likewise, pictorial. Over time, words shifted from being solely tools employed by religious and political authorities to a significant mode of artistic expression.

This shift becomes most obvious when moving into the eighteenth century, where words and images are twisted in an ironic and satirical fashion to make social commentary and attack authorities, as in the work of Hogarth. Known as “the guilty conscience of the British eighteenth century,” Hogarth’s work is one of the first to reach out of the aristocratic mindset into the public realm and to express a personal view (Graham-Dixon, 95). By delving into wider social and largely middle class concerns, he “[revised] the aesthetic discourse for art with its rejection of low and inappropriate subject matter” (Paulson). Indeed, he insisted on incorporating the imagery and language – the signage – of his time. He depicts the street, which appears as it would have been then with salesmen and women, pub signs, placards and public spots. This way, Hogarth’s work communicated with the public; it facilitated the important process of drawing associations among the images and the words. Indeed, whereas words had previously been about instruction, now the words were more open to “interpretation” and aimed for “the interplay of artist and spectator” (Paulson, 24). With this in mind, “Hogarth brought works of art into the lives of men and women who had never owned or purchased images before…He was the chief pioneer of…a genuinely popular visual art form” (Graham-Dixon, 99).

Hogarth has been a model for many British artists to this day. Of the contemporary British artists that will be discussed, all of them have taken after Hogarth in that they have incorporated language that is accessible, critical of authority and artistic conventions, and frequently satirical. Graham-Dixon claims that “the history of British art after Hogarth cannot be told in quite the same way …It must take account of a growing sense of duty felt by artists to themselves…The lives and struggles of individual British artists will necessarily form a greater part of the story from now on” (103).

Indeed, following the French Revolution, British art and literature took on a more self-expressive form. “The restrictive taste of the aristocracy” was regarded “as a kind of tyranny” and artists “would write in the plain language of plain men,” a desire that still persists today (Graham-Dixon, 104, 130).

The early nineteenth century saw an establishment of ‘the self’ as the main subject among writers and artists. William Wordsworth’s writing attests to this self-centered vision in its sentimental and introspective quality. However, as Graham-Dixon puts it, “Wordsworth’s desire…was to armour his own frail subjectivity by making it appear a monument” (137). We shall later see that artists today likewise verbally express highly personal matters while making their work simultaneously stand for universal concerns.