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Note: This is the plain-vanilla text of the research portion of the thesis for my Master's degree in illustration at the Birmingham Institute of Art and Design. A PDF is available here (1 MB), which has much better formatting, lots of images, etc.
Research
In a recent interview[2], the illustrator and designer Gary Baseman (fig 2) brought up a term he invented to describe his way of working across different media, including editorial illustration, advertising, games and toy design, television, film and paintings intended for gallery exhibition.
I have actually created a term for this - Pervasive Art. The notion is that as long as you stay true to your aesthetic, and have a strong sense of meaning, then the work can be appropriate in almost any medium - from print to TV to film to paintings to commerce. I think a lot of artists are doing this, and it’s my goal.
But he acknowledged that this way of working is unusual and can be difficult: ‘Even though I’ve been around for a while, I always have to introduce myself to a new audience. This can be very frustrating, but the thing I’ve learned is that everyone has their blinders on and are involved in their own areas.’
We take it for granted that there are different media and art forms, each sectioned off from the others, and we don’t expect, for example, conceptual artists to write television screenplays. On the other hand, there are the occasional reminders that maybe these boundaries a little arbitrary, that they only reinforce conventional ways of thinking and act as a barrier to originality. There’s this nagging question when you look at a political cartoon in the newspaper or watch a particularly inventive sitcom: ‘But is it art?’ And why, after all, should a painter be lionised for enlarging images from comic books, when comic books themselves are considered, at best, ‘paraliterature’?
As an artist working in the field of illustration, it’s worth looking at these questions. Illustration is part of a popular visual tradition that is built into the fabric of Western culture and continues to flourish, but is usually ignored by critics because it doesn’t fit into conventional arguments about fine art. For illustration to have vitality and meaning, it needs to be open to the influence of the history of popular and fine art. Likewise, fine artists who limit themselves to the stale confines of conceptual art, shutting themselves off from the entire Western visual tradition, are likely to become even more tedious than they already are.
The theory that I’ve found useful as a way of approaching this problem is what I call pictorial writing, which is a loose translation of the term ut pictura poesis, ‘as is poetry, so is the picture’, with ‘poetry’ standing in for literature generally. A quote from Horace, it was resurrected in the Renaissance and ultimately used to justify an laundry-list of tiresome rules - such as that pictures, like poetry, should represent idealised figures in historical settings - in what became known as academic painting. However, dogma aside, the theory represented an underlying assumption in Europe about all kinds of visual art, up until the end of the second world war, which was as a kind of literature that communicated something. Even the most experimental artists before that, such as Picasso, never strayed into purely abstract art[3]. We might think of modernism as the invention of an intellectual elite which inevitably separated itself more and more from the realities of the day, but it has been shown that just the opposite is true - early 20th century avant-garde movements such as Expressionism, Dada and Surrealism drew on ideas that were sweeping through all levels of society[4]. One current progressive group combines protests against the invasion of Iraq with the collective authorship of popular thrillers[5].
All this is just to make the point that the idea of pictures as something essentially different from other kinds of ‘literature’ is relatively new. Instead, it was long taken for granted that all kinds of visual and literary art influenced each other, flowed across borders, and was part of an international culture that was common to different classes of society across Europe[6]. Though society and culture are increasingly atomised, art still functions in this way; ideas bubble up from the population into television, novels, films and comic books, and return to the popular culture transformed. Comic strips and animated films serve the same function in society now that woodcuts and copperplate engravings did in the centuries between the invention of printing and the advent of electronic media.
The Middle Ages
The middle ages is the starting point for European pictorial writing, and is the source of much of the iconography, folklore, customs, sayings and conventional wisdom that still informs Western visual art. For later artists, the period came to represent everything that was opposed to the cold, calculating, soulless modern world; movements like the pre-Raphaelites, the Symbolists, Die Brücke and the later Expressionists drew on the spirit of medieval art in order to inject new life and relevance into art. When we look at the medieval world, the intellectual barriers we take for granted today disappear: it is suddenly impossible to draw clear distinctions between art, science, mythology, folklore, magic and religion.
What makes this period such an inspiration to artists, even now, is the richness and vitality of its art and the fact that it seems to spring from a culture shared by the illiterate peasant and the lord in his castle alike. One example is the carvings found in medieval cathedral corbels, roof bosses, misericords and the like. To a modern eye it is astonishing to see bawdy jokes carved into the ceiling of a holy sanctuary alongside grotesque images of saints being boiled alive (fig. 3). The contrast with, say, the tepid religious art in the Vatican Museum’s modern section couldn’t be greater.
Joseph Campbell argues that the thirteenth century, following the age of the great crusades and the decline of the aristocratic taste of verse romance, saw ‘the first major flourishing in Europe of a literature of the people’[7], a literature that wasn’t confined to parchment.
Prose compendiums of traditional lore began appearing, filled with every kind of gathered anecdote and history of wonder.... A tumbling, broad, inexhaustible flood of popular merry tales, hero, saint and devil legends, animal fables, mock heroics, slap-stick jokes, riddles, pious allegories and popular ballads burst abruptly into manuscript.... Compounded with themes from the Cloister and the Castle, mixed with elements from the Bible and from the heathenness of the Orient, as well as the deep pre-Christian past, the wonderful hurly-burly broke into the stonework of the cathedrals, grinned from the stained glass, twisted and curled in humourous grotesque in and out of the letters of illuminated manuscripts, appeared in tapestries, on saddles and weapons, on trinket-caskets, mirrors and combs.[8]
Such material made up a common culture in the Middle Ages that was widely recognised wherever it appeared. Misericords, with their often bizarre imagery, were just an extension of the sorts of things people might mention in conversation, whether it is a scene of two women plucking a fowl, Alexander’s flight into heaven in his basket, the owl in his ignorance, the unjust alewife (fig. 4) or the monkey holding a flask of urine[9]. References like these fill works we would today treat as objective and scientific, like descriptions of animals or the workings of the human body; a bestiary page of a lion gives it characteristics from a fable, and a diagram of the human body becomes an opportunity for artistic expression (figs 5 and 6).
This literature was - like the rest of European culture - produced through a long process of cultural ‘digestion’. Many of the tales and legends of the Middle Ages originated from quite foreign sources, like the Hindu Panchatantra, which in the thirteenth century made its way into German and Italian from the original Sanskrit via Persian, Arabic and Hebrew. ‘Anonymous’ tales as collected in compilations made their way into the literary works of Chaucer, Boccaccio, Hans Sachs and others, and certain tales from these authors became popular and entered back into the body of oral literature. Dante’s fourteenth-century Divine Comedy is full of references to medieval beliefs and legends[10]. In the late eighteenth century the fashion of literary fairy tales - inspired in part by Antoine Galland’s French translation of the Thousand and One Nights - produced new tales which were again assimilated into popular culture. All this material had acquired such a genuine local flavour by the time of the Brothers Grimm that it was thought to have emerged from an aboriginal German soul[13].
The same process applied to the way medieval visual art was created. Artists didn’t see themselves as isolated individuals challenging tradition, but rather as bringing tradition up to date. ‘It was more common than not for an artist to look first to a prototype or series of exemplars, to enter into a dialogue with his or her sources, and to innovate in terms of style or iconography by careful degrees of departure from tradition and authority. In art the achievements of the past were continually being consulted, absorbed, reinterpreted and brought to new relevance in the works of the present.’[14] Seen in this light, one can think of Picasso with his minotaurs (fig 8) as taking part in the same process as the artists of the Middle Ages.
Popular prints
Alongside the revolutions of the Renaissance, Mannerism, Romanticism, etc., popular prints continued to proliferate across Europe, purveying tales, gags and and imagery that sometimes seems to have been taken directly from medieval sources. Just as tales moved back and forth between the oral and literary worlds, a particular legend might be drawn from popular lore to be represented in a Bruegel painting, which could later become the source of a cheap print[15]. There were a vast range of intermediate levels within the world of prints between the two poles of academic and popular art, according to time, place, social level and technical aspects of manufacture, and all borrowed from one another, but ‘contrary to what is often suggested, when one print is based on another it is usually not a slavish or clumsy imitation but a new creation’[16].
Popular prints drew on all sorts of folklore[17] and were addressed not to ‘the masses’ but to all levels of society; the word ‘popular’ has been defined in this sense as ‘read or seen by almost everybody (and therefore) part of the consciousness of the educated as well as the uneducated’[18]. Like medieval art, popular prints came to be seen by some as a way of revitalising official art. In France, where popular prints are known as imagerie populaire, realistic novelists like Champfleur and painters like Courbet opposed the naïve vigour of the popular print to the blandness of academic art[19]. These prints filled a place in the culture later taken over by newspaper cartoons, chapbooks, penny dreadfuls, cheap illustrated novels (feuilleton)[19.5], movie serials, comic books and television.
Bruegel
With the advent of the Renaissance and humanism, the history of Western art began to pivot around individual art ‘geniuses’ and intellectual progress, but these artists often took an active part in producing prints for popular consumption, if they were not plagiarised by printmakers. Dürer, who was obsessed with depicting the ideal human form, produced copperplate engravings of a finer workmanship than had ever been seen. The theoretical concerns that motivated Dürer were lost on Pieter Bruegel the Elder, a near-contemporary, whose vision of the world belonged essentially to the Middle Ages.
Bruegel’s vision - the suggestion of a world in miniature; the passion for endless detail; the abrupt contrasts between the literal and the fantastic; the mixture of brutality, licentiousness and guilt - his whole way of seeing things belonged to the dying Middle Ages. Even the seemingly straightforward seasonal landscapes belong to a systematised, descriptive tradition that had its direct roots in medieval illuminated manuscripts.[20]
Bruegel was, Roberts notes, indifferent to the illusionistic degree of finish and the idealised figures that characterised his contemporaries. His medieval approach can be clearly seen in paintings such as ‘The Triumph of Death’ (fig 7) and in ‘The Harvesters’, which belongs to the same tradition as the depiction of the month of September in the fourteenth-century ‘Tres Riches Heures du Duc de Berry’. In such paintings - as well as in his famous depictions of peasant festivals and sayings - Bruegel depicted themes familiar to the general populace, drawing upon a long tradition of imagery.
Hogarth and other artists
Bruegel, Hieronymous Bosch and other Netherlandish painters came to be seen as a distinct, ‘grotesque’ school, and William Hogarth was initially seen as a sort of English exponent of this art. Hogarth was one of the first English artists to compete in his own country with the more fashionable imports, and he was able to raise the tone of English printmaking with engravings from his own paintings. But Hogarth, too, drew on and was imitated by sources from popular culture, in paintings and prints from the theatre for example. His print series, beginning with A Harlot’s Progress (fig 14), are richly allusive to contemporary iconography, including prints such as The Cully Flaug’d and The London Curtezan[21]. The prints themselves became the subject of references, as in a contemporary adaptation of Samuel Richardson’s novel, Pamela: Or Virtue Rewarded (fig 15), which set itself up as a genteel answer to Hogarth’s supposed vulgarity. The print’s near-parody of Hogarth’s image, down to the heroine’s state of partial undress, is pointed.
The late-nineteenth century Symbolists and the early twentieth century Expressionists were among the other groups of artists drawing on the medieval visual tradition as an antidote to the modern world. James Ensor, a Belgian Symbolist who lived most of his life above his parents’ gift shop in Ostende, adapted medieval motifs such as the Dance of Death and the second coming of Christ to an ironic modern context. Death Pursuing the Human Herd and The Entry of Christ into Brussels use a characteristic motif of the reclusive artist, the ambivalent depiction of the mass of humanity. Frans Masereel, an Expressionist, worked in woodcuts that have some of the simplicity and expressive power of medieval prints. His Passionate Journey (fig 9) is a story of social injustice and spiritual renewal told in 165 sequential images.
Conclusion
Artists continue to draw on striking symbolic imagery from the general culture; in the modern world there may be more than ever a need for visual symbolism that stimulates the imagination[22]. Nowadays the imagery of mythology comes with a psychoanalytic veneer, as with illustrator Baseman’s 2003 gallery show, ‘Happy Idiot and Other Paintings of Unattainable Beauty’[23]. In a series of paintings using dreamlike images such as mermaids, three-headed snowmen and skeletons (fig 10), Baseman builds a highly personal allegory. ‘When people see it they think it’s very child-like. But it’s really an adult allegory about desire, longing, sex, the acceptance of man’s attraction to unattainable beauty,’ he said in an interview with the Web site Strangeco.com.
Baseman says he’s inspired by toys and advertising statues from the 20s and 30s, early twentieth century painting, the Mexican art of Day of the Dead, Warner Bros. cartoons, Charles Addams and many other influences[24]. (Some of this iconography, like the Mexican tradition of Day of the Dead (fig 16) or mermaids (fig 11), can be traced directly back to medieval sources.) Unlike the work of Pop Artists, Baseman’s work has a personal symbolism that is in contrast to its outwardly commercial form; it communicates rather than commenting on itself. A figure called Dumb Luck (fig 13), for example, is ‘a really happy rabbit that is thrilled to have a lucky rabbit’s foot and yet has a peg leg.... This character embodies my philosophy in life, of working as hard as you can, and going after your dream and ultimately it’s all still up to dumb luck and there’s always a price to pay.’ [25] It is worth noting that while Baseman is influenced by old toy design, he is also an active designer of board games and toys, so that his designs are passing back into popular culture.
Notes
[2] Baseman, Gary. ‘Gary Baseman’s Happy Idiot’. Web: Strangeco.com, 2004. (Interview with illustrator Gary Baseman.) See: http://www.strangeco.com/news/events_baseman.html
[3] During their more neoclassical moods Picasso and other modernists explicitly related their art to the Western tradition, with images of nymphs, fauns, minotaurs and the like.
[4] In How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art (see bibliography), Serge Guilbaut’s argument that ‘art, even the art of the avant-garde, is part of the general culture, not autonomous or above it’ is so outrageous that it apparently ‘forces us to think differently not only about art and art history but about society itself’, according to a review in the New York Times Book Review. So what happened after the second world war? In his book, Guilbaut argues that a combination of American financial and military might, its safety from invaders and Nazis, and Europe destroying itself in the second world war led to the US dominating fine art after 1945 - note the absence of actual new ideas in this equation. It is now considered controversial to point out that the greatest American artists, figures like Jackson Pollock and Edward Hopper, were formed by an exposure to ideas developed in Europe - Pollock and the Abstract Expressionists via the avant-garde who took refuge in New York City during the war. A book by another French national, Painting American: The Rise of American Artists, Paris 1867-New York 1948, by Annie Cohen-Solal (translated by the author with Laurie Hurwitz-Attias, New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 2001), implicitly refutes Guilbaut’s thesis. But her history looks at modern art from the point of view of patrons, dealers, collectors and museum directors, rather than artists, which sort of speaks for itself.
[5] The Luther Blissett Project, now renamed Wu Ming, grew out of a progressive Italian political movement and has authored a string of thrillers that promote an anarchistic world view. The group, whose members prefer a collective name such as Wu Ming (Chinese for ‘nameless’), claim to have been inspired by ‘ancient legends regarding folk heroes, the language adopted by the EZLN, genre cinema and Western pop culture in general, as well as the manifold experiences of media pranksters and communication guerillas since the 1920s’ (Wu Ming, Giap/digest #11, Oct 19, 2001, wumingfoundation.com), and equate their role to that of oral historians in an African village. Most of their books have been bestsellers in translation across Europe but so far only one, Q, has been published in the UK. Wu Ming give a radical interpretation to the process of collective cultural production I will explore further on, arguing that ‘writing is always a collective process, ideas are nobody’s property, “genius” does not exist, there’s just a Great Recombination’ (Press release for Q, February 1999, lutherblissett.net).
[6] England isn’t the best example of this to look at, being a bit remote and aloof from developments elsewhere in Europe, and indeed ultimately turning much of its medieval figurative art into rubble. In Hogarth’s time the English well-to-do were still importing continentals for their portraits and public art; Hogarth saw the founding of the first British Academy of Art in the early 18th century, a mere few centuries after those on the continent. However the point is clear enough in countries like France, Germany, the Netherlands and Italy, the same countries that were, coincidentally, conquered in succession by Caesar Augustus, Charlemagne and Napoleon. All this turmoil and bloodshed seems to have had a stimulating effect on visual culture.
[7] Campbell, Joseph. The Complete Grimm’s Fairy Tales (folkloristic commentary). London: Routledge, 1998. p. 849.
[8] ibid., p. 848-9
[9] Harding, Mike. A Little Book of Misericords. London: Aurum Press, 1998. p. 13. The monkey image is ‘a satire on the quack doctors who were held to be as untrustworthy as a monkey’. The unjust alewife is a figure often depicted as a denizen of Hell, naked and gleefully brandishing a huge tankard; the idea is barmaids who give you less beer than they should will end up paying for it. Evidently British people’s obsession with the amount of foam in beer is not a new thing.
[10] For example the legend of Trajan and the poor widow. This legend, commemorating the justice of the Trajan, tells how the emperor was once leaving Rome at the head of his army and was stopped by a poor widow, who begged him for justice against the murderer of her son. The emperor wanted to put her off, but when she reproached him for neglecting his duty he yielded. St Gregory is said to have seen this story represented as a bas-relief on Trajan’s Column in the forum of Trajan, and been so impressed that he brought the dead emperor back from Hell by his prayers and baptised him to salvation. Dante sees a sculpture representing this legend in Purgatory - so vivid that he calls it ‘visible speech’[11] - and later meets Trajan in the Heaven of the Just. Dorothy L. Sayers has this to say of the Trajan episode in Purgatory: ‘Whereas the modern art critic is apt to praise the art of the middle ages for its symbolism and stylisation, the medieval critic himself tended to rejoice in an almost photographic realism.... However... the quality (Dante) admires is not so much realism as a (literally) supernatural expressiveness.’[12]
[11] Alighieri, Dante. Purgatory. London: Penguin, 1955. p. 145
[12] Sayers, Dorothy Leigh. Purgatory (translation and commentary). London: Penguin, 1955. p. 148-9
[13] The process wasn’t confined to Europe. The tale of Aladdin seems now to have been invented by Galland, rather than translated from any Arabic original; but the tale went back into Arabic from the famous French version, so that a pseudo-Arabic tale has become ‘genuine’.
[14] Sekules, Veronica. Medieval Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. p. 56.
[15] O’Connell, Sheila. The Popular Print in England. London: British Museum Press, 1999. p. 162.
[16] French Popular Imagery: Five Centuries of Prints. London: Arts council of Great Britain, 1974. (Catalogue for an exhibition at the Hayward Gallery.) p. 7.
[17] There is, however, a marked distinction between the subject matter of continental prints and those in England. In continental Europe, prints were overwhelmingly of a religious nature, while in England they were overwhelmingly ballads. In 1709 Jonathan Swift wrote of:
Ballads pasted on the wall
Of Joan of France and English Moll,
Fair Rosamund and Robin Hood,
The little Children in the Wood...
Dramatist Thomas Holcroft recalled such titles as ‘Death and the Lady’, ‘Margaret’s Ghost’ and ‘King Charles’ Golden Rules’. (Both references from O’Connell, op. cit., p. 17-18.) O’Connell notes that ‘literacy in Britain was much higher than has often been thought’ in contrast with the continent.
[18] O’Connell, op. cit., p. 14.
[19] O’Connell writes: ‘With his book Histoire de l’imagerie populaire (1869) (Champfleur) hoped to encourage French artists to turn for inspiration to what he saw as the naïve but vigorous work of provincial printmakers rather than the mediocrity of the Salon. Popular prints were seen, not as in England as an antiquarian interest, but as a vital source for future development.’ (O’Connell, op. cit., p. 220.)
[19.5] Nineteenth century France’s trashy illustrated novels, like many popular prints (such as those commemorating executions) and television, appealed to popular and sometimes prurient tastes. They were far more risqué and also far more widely read than Victorian serialised novels, thanks to a British tax which made such books affordable only to the middle classes. Out of the mass of anonymous feuilleton writers and illustrators rose giants like Balzac, Dumas and Doré. V.S. Pritchett describes the rise of feuilleton as the result of a collapse of religious faith and the orthodoxy of the eighteenth century.
...A new kind of writing was gobbled up by a public that sought its entertainment in cheap novelettes of terror and cruelty, sexual license, improbable mystery and melodramatic fantasy. Now wonder, adultery, sexual aberration, violence and supernatural terrors were exotic subjects. They were imported from the Gothic novelists in England, for with the fall of Napoleon English fashions ruled. (Pritchett, V.S. Balzac. London: Chatto & Windus, 1973. p. 50.)
[20] Roberts, Keith. Bruegel. London: Phaidon Press, 2002. p. 6.
[21] Hallett, Mark. Hogarth. London: Phaidon Press, 2000. p. 88.
[22] Robert L. Delevoy argues the interest in symbolically rich art at the time he was writing in the mid-seventies (and, I would argue, again today) is triggered by ‘a sudden awakening to the symbolical void produced by electronic civilisation’. Other symptoms are ‘the expansion of psychoanalysis; the spread of sub-rational ethnological lore; the fashion for science fiction and the occult sciences; the demand for holidays and escape; the attraction exercised by clairvoyance; the fascination exercised by death’. (Delevoy, Robert L. Symbolists and Symbolism. London: Macmillan, 1978. p. 9)
[23] Ended November 29, 2003, Earl McGrath Gallery, 20 W. 57th Street, New York, NY 10019. (Baseman, op. cit.)
[24] From ibid., some of Baseman’s many influences:
I love toys. I have a collection of old advertising figures— the Michelin Man, Freddy Kilowatt, old Felix the Cat toys as well. I don’t see them as toys, I see them as sculpture, as works of art that happened to be created in the 20s and 30s and 40s. Pete the Pup from the 30s is another obsession of mine. I don’t think he ever had a cartoon, so I see him as a failed cartoon character and use him as a personal analogy. I own like 14 or 15 of these guys.... The inspiration comes from all over. I went to elementary school with Bob Clampett’s daughter. He was responsible for a lot of the Warner Brothers cartoons including Beany & Cecil, and is generally credited with creating Tweety Bird. Meeting him at age 12 was major - I could see that a living person could accomplish things like that. I come from an Eastern European heritage, so I really identity with artists and painters that are very expressive and iconic; a lot of painters from the 30s and 40s; Mexican art and Day of the Dead; Japanese artists like Nara and Murakami; Saul Steinberg, Antoine Francois; humorists like Charles Adams and James Thurber, modern painters like Schnabel and Koons; friends like Mark Ryden, Tim Biskup, the Clayton Brothers, Shag; music like Elvis Costello and Leonard Cohen; John Lennon… there are always people who saved your life at different times.
[25] ibid. It isn’t a stretch to say that the Dumb Luck figure is in the same spirit as a symbol like the Rota Fortuna (‘Wheel of Fortune’, fig 12), found in innumerable medieval manuscripts and cathedral carvings, as well as in antiquarian Pre-Raphaelite paintings, Goth computer art and hippy/New Age Tarot decks. (A friend of mine from San Antonio, Joe Rosales, once adapted the symbolism of the Tarot deck to the Hello Kitty universe, which, while it didn’t have any particular personal meaning for Rosales, worked surprisingly well. See fig 17.) Below are the words to the Latin lyric Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi (used in Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana) in a literal English translation. Baseman’s comment on his philosophy of life is pretty much in the same spirit.
O Fortune,
like the moon
you are changeable,
ever waxing
and waning;
hateful life
first oppresses
and then soothes
as fancy takes it,
poverty
and power
it melts them like ice.
Fate - monstrous
and empty
you whirling wheel,
you are malevolent,
well-being is in vain
and always fades to nothing,
shadowed
and veiled
you plague me too;
now through the game
I bring my bare back
to your villainy.
Fate is against me
in health
and virtue,
driven on
and weighted down,
always enslaved.
So at this hour
without delay
pluck the vibrating strings;
since Fate
strikes down the strong man,
everyone weep with me!
Select bibliography
Aichele, K. Porter. Paul Klee’s Pictorial Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Alighieri, Dante. Purgatory. London: Penguin, 1955.
Anglo, Michael. Penny Dreadfuls and Other Victorian Horrors. London: Jupiter, 1977.
Ashton, John, ed. Chapbooks of the Eighteenth Century. London: Chatto & Windus, Piccadilly, 1882.
Ayres, James. British Folk Art. London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1977.
Baseman, Gary. ‘Gary Baseman’s Happy Idiot’. Web: Strangeco.com, 2004. (Interview with illustrator Gary Baseman.) See: http://www.strangeco.com/news/events_baseman.html
Becks-Malorny, Ulrike. Ensor: Masks, Death and the Sea. London: Taschen, 2000.
Blake, Quentin. Words and Pictures. London: Jonathan Cape, 2000.
B, David. ‘La bande dessinée, c’est de l’écriture...’, interview in Positions, issue 4. (www.actes-sud.fr/positions/) Actes Sud, 2004.
Campbell, Joseph. The Complete Grimm’s Fairy Tales (folkloristic commentary). London: Routledge, 1998.
Clarke, May and Clement Crisp. Design for Ballet. London: Studio Vista, 1978.
Collinson, Robert. The Story of Street Literature: Forerunner of the Popular Press. London: JM Dent & Sons Ltd, 1973.
Corbett, Edward P. J., and Robert J. Connors. Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Delevoy, Robert L. Symbolists and Symbolism. London: Macmillan, 1978.
Dorson, Richard M., ed. Folklore and Folklife, an Introduction. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1972.
Foote, Timothy. The World of Bruegel. Netherlands: Time-Life International, 1971.
French Popular Imagery: Five Centuries of Prints. London: Arts council of Great Britain, 1974. (Catalogue for an exhibitioin at the Hayward Gallery.)
Gaignebet, Claude and Lajoux, Jean-Dominique. Art profane et religion populaire au moyen age. Paris: Puf, 1985. A virtual encyclopedia of secular beliefs, tales, gestures and customs represented in visual form in French sculpture and carvings.
Gardiner, Arthur. A Handbook of English Medieval Scultpure. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1937.
Gibson, Walter S. Bruegel. London: Thames & Hudson, 1977.
Guilbaut, Serge. How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985.
Hallett, Mark. Hogarth. London: Phaidon Press, 2000.
Harding, Mike. A Little Book of Misericords. London: Aurum Press, 1998.
Heath, Malcolm. Aristotle’s Poetics (introduction). London: Penguin Books, 1996.
Lee, Rensselaer W. Ut Pictura Poesis, The Humanistic Theory of Painting. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., Inc. 1967.
O’Connell, Sheila. The Popular Print in England. London: British Museum Press, 1999.
Pritchett, V.S. Balzac. London: Chatto & Windus, 1973.
Rachleff, Owen S. The Occult in art. London: Cromwell Editions, 1990.
Roberts, Keith. Bruegel. London: Phaidon Press, 2002.
Sayers, Dorothy Leigh. Purgatory (translation and commentary). London: Penguin, 1955.
Sekules, Veronica. Medieval Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Spengler, Oswald. The Decline of the West. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.
Wu Ming. ‘Stories Belong to Everyone: Tale Tellers, Multitudes and the Refusal of Intellectual Property’. Extract from a speech by Wu Ming at ‘Collective Intelligence’ panel of Wizards of OS #2 conference, Berlin, 13 Oct, 2001, printed in English translation in Giap/digest #116. wumingfoundation.com.
Wu Ming. ‘From Multiple Names to Wu Ming’. Interview with Wu Ming in Pulp Libri #29, Jan-Feb 2001.
Ricoeur, Paul. The Rule of Metaphor. London: Routledge, 1978.
Sauerläden, Willibald. Gothic Sculpture in France, 1140-1270. London: Thames & Hudson, 1972.
Stove, Laurence. Sculpture in Britain: The Middle Ages. London: Penguin, 1972.
Wechsler, Judith. A Human Comedy: Physiognomy and Caricature in 19th Century Paris. London: Thames & Hudson, 1982.
Witemeyer, Hugh. George Eliot and the Visual Arts. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1979.
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