Summer Reading: The Recreation of Language in Twentieth-Century Art

To read is an optical act; to see well, a form of literacy. These fundamental modernist insights, embodied at the turn of the century in the late poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé and in early cubist art, inaugurated a cultural epoch that would be marked by the vigorous, vibrant mutual “recreation” of word and image by artists and writers from throughout the world.

Drawn from the collection of the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center and fourteen lenders, the exhibition Summer Reading brought together paintings, photographs, prints, drawings, collages, books and book-objects, poet-artist collaborations, comic strips, and more by over 50 major figures, ranging from René Magritte to Cy Twombly, Saul Steinberg to Marcel Duchamp, Jenny Holzer to Ed Ruscha, Guillaume Apollinaire to Xu Bing. This full-color brochure features a critical essay by curator Joel Smith and a complete checklist of the exhibition.