Tradition and the Text/Image: Ed Ruscha's Word Paintings and the Multimodal Legacies of American Modernism

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In 1959, Ed Ruscha began painting pictures of words. While typically located in the 1960s American Pop Art movement, in which he was a leading figure, I will reframe these works as central to the wider tradition of C20th text/image making. Our current attitude towards media consumption, centred on the expectation that text and image function cooperatively, without rigid compartmentalisation, is indebted to Ruscha's pioneering multimodal practice. Resituating Ruscha will establish a more accurate lineage of text/image interaction, connecting Modernist avant-garde experimentation with our present moment.The text/image is a way of understanding Ruscha's paintings which prioritises above all else their symbiosis of verbal and visual modalities. It is also a way to compare them to other such instances of multimodal art, beyond the parameters within which his work is routinely contained. I will use Ruscha's archetypical text/images as the standard from which to delineate a text/image making tradition, from the beginnings of Modernism onwards. This is to fully appreciate how text/image practice developed over the last century, which in turn will illuminate how it continues to develop today.The major publications on Ruscha (Benezra 2000, Marshall 2003), regard his multimodality as a product of 1960s radicalism, as a decisive break from the supposed monomodality of Modernism. It was in Modernism however that many key foundations for text/image practice were laid. It is more constructive to position Ruscha as building on, rather than reacting against, these foundations. Using several recent studies in this area (Albright 2000, Davis 2014, Lewis 2020), I will identify significant instances of multimodal Modernism, both poets concerned with the visual and painters concerned with words. I will then chart their influence, locating the legacies of these earlier works in the paintings of Ruscha.There are three distinct strands of text/image experimentation in Modernism, forming the three sections of my argument, each pairing a poet with a painter. The first is embodied in the work of Ezra Pound and Charles Demuth, who saw text/image interaction as a way of forging new and hybrid sign systems. The second can be found in the work of William Carlos Williams and Stuart Davis, who saw the text/image as an expression of objecthood and materiality. The third consists of the work of ee cummings and Lee Krasner, who found only abstraction in the text/image, a cancelling out of semiotic functions. Each of these strands constitutes a load-bearing influence in the work of Ruscha, whose text/images continuedon the multimodal tradition that they engendered.The impact of this line of inquiry is to reposition Ruscha as a central figure in C20th multimodal art, a conduit between the Modernist avant-garde and our own experience. These paintings of words profoundly altered the course of text/image interaction, which ultimately lead to our current moment of unfettered access across medial boundaries. In making connections between his work and earlier instances of text/image making in Modernism, I will forge a clear lineage of the practice from its tentative experimental beginnings to the fully-fledged modal symbioses of Ruscha.