She argues that Futurist, Dadaist, and Cubist artists emphasized materiality as the heart of their experimental approach to both visual and poetic forms of representation by mid-century, however, the tenets of New Criticism and High Modernism had polarized the visual and the literary.ĭrucker suggests a methodology closer to the actual practices of the early avant-garde artists, based on a rereading of their critical and theoretical writings. In The Visible Word, Johanna Drucker shows how later art criticism has distorted our understanding of such works. Early in this century, Futurist and Dada artists developed brilliantly innovative uses of typography that blurred the boundaries between visual art and literature.
