When New and Old Ideas Are Unified In a Work of Art "Pictopoetry" As an Intermedia Art Form In recent years, in the art field, there has been an increasing interest in intermedia art. Intermedia is a term used for referring to the art created from the 1960s to contemporary times. In a broad sense, this concept is defined as an artistic representation of "any phenomenon involving more than one medium or what originally was conceived of as one medium" (Wolf, 36). The unity that results from the blending of more than one medium in an artefact has been studied in the last decades with regards to its applicability on the art created within the contemporary practice. However, the objective of this study is to determine whether it is possible to discuss "Pictopoetry", an artwork associated with the historical avant-garde and created in 1924, using the concept from the 1960s. Up until now, the general method of analysing an artwork was based on the description of the artwork in its historical context1. One of the limitations of this method is that it remains restrictive in its own time and that it does not include a wider interpretation. In order to update this research and to make it more understandable for a 21st century reader, who has developed a new vocabulary and a different understanding of the past terminology, a use of contemporary terms is desirable. Therefore, a solution would be to apply the definition of intermedia in the analysis of the historical artworks. To address this problem, this paper analyses the example of "Pictopoetry". This is a challenging case because, among the studies discussing this artwork2, only one researcher uses the term of intermedia. Writing about "Pictopoetry", Andrei Oisteanu considers it to be "an intermedial art form that recalls an effort to coordinate the combined senses through multiple traditional forms" (12). In other words, "Pictopoetry" coordinates the act of reading words with admiring a work of visual art. There are several reasons to include "Pictopoetry" under the umbrella of intermedia art, and consequently, to use a new methodology of analysing an artwork from the 20th century. "Pictopoetry" was "invented"3 in October 1924 for the unique issue of the Romanian Magazine "75 HP" by Victor Brauner (painter) and Ilarie Voronca (poet), who brought together elements from painting and poetry. Researchers included this artwork in the Dada movement as part of a larger artistic belief recognised under the name of avant-garde chronologically included in the first two decades of 20th century. "Pictopoetry" encompasses the main ideas of Dada whose aim was to realise a rupture with the separation of various arts in order to break the boundaries between them and to realise a final unification. Because of its total negation and refusal of any existent reality, the idea took the form of a nihilistic concept. In practice, this concept was used by the Dadaists in unifying visual art with music, literature, and choreography. This idea was conveyed in Simon Morley's words as "the ideal of a medium's self-sufficiency [that] was replaced by the desire for an interactive fusion of painting, sculpture, poetry, prose, performance and music" (61). The aims of "Pictopoetry" meet this description because of the invented fusion between painting and poetry. Another integration of "Pictopoetry" in the concept of intermedia is given by its overlapping on Allan Kaprow's4 theory. He formulated one of the most critical characterisation of intermedia art as "rejecting painting in any form, without, however, eliminating the use of painting" (11). In the same way, "Pictopoetry" eliminates and concurrently keeps values of painting and poetry, combining them in order to create a new artwork. It ignores the basic and logical principles of arts keeping only their essential characteristics, such as reading and seeing. The inventors, Victor Brauner and Ilarie Voronca, used only the basic elements of each art: for painting, they selected the visual sense together with colour and form; for literature they chose the word, without its logical sense. Consequently, by spreading words on a coloured surface, they came to a result without a logical meaning. They imagined a reader who does not concentrate on the meaning but on the idea of the visual element - be it word, colour or form - in its own existence. Therefore, using Allan Kaprow's own interpretation, it is possible to infer that there is a connection between "Pictopoetry" and intermedia. Furthermore, materiality and technique is something that needs to be taken into account when discussing the concept of intermedia on a historical artwork. "Pictopoetry" is an intermedia artwork created with the use of old means of artistic expressivity, such as painting and poetry, and not with the use of new media, as is the current understanding of this term. This is an important factor in the context of intermedia as a term used especially for contemporary art, where the elements of new media are prevalent. In opposition with the older artistic means, new media that "emerged only with modern mass-media" (Lütticken, 1) and that is associated with the use of technology and the contemporary general practices. These new methods challenge thoughts that were technically impossible and therefore unknown to an artist in 1924. However, the technical creation of "Pictopoetry", as part of a magazine, was considered a new medium for the first half of 20th century. For this reason, "Pictopoetry" can be defined as a new expression created by means of older elements such as colour, form and written word. It is indeed possible to state that a new term used for a historical artwork is useful for a better understanding and that it is adequate to a contemporary reader. "Pictopoetry" is a reliable example because of its conjunction between two media - painting and poetry - and it can be considered as a precedent of intermedia art in the way in which this term was defined by Werner Wolf and used in the Allan Kaprow's statement. This paper took only one example of the past; however, more research on this topic needs to be undertaken before the association between an historical artwork and this new term is more clearly understood. Bibliography Morley, Simon, Writing on the Wall. Word and Image in Modern Art. London: Thames & Hudson, 2003 Wolf, Werner, Musicalization of Fiction. A Study in the Theory and History of Intermediality. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999 Kaprow, Allan, Essays on the Bluring of Art and Life. Berkeley etc.: University of California Press, 1993 Oisteanu, Andrei, "Poezia vizuala si Tristan Tzara" (Visual Poetry and Tristan Tzara). Caietele Tristan Tzara (The Notebooks of Tristan Tzara), nr. 1, 1998 Lütticken, Sven, "Undead Media", Afterimage, Jan. 2004 1 One of the most reliable sources on the methodologies used by art historians is: Donald Preziosi ed., "The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology", Oxford, etc.: Oxford University Press, 1998 2 References to "Pictopoetry" can be found in: 75 HP, la revue pictopoétique, Marina Vanci-Perahim and in the more generally in studies on Eastern Europe avant-garde such as Benson, Timothy O.; Forgács, Éva, Between Worlds. A Sourcebook of Central European Avant-Gardes, 1910-1930, London: The MIT Press, 2002 3 I will use the word "invented/inventors" and not "created/creators" - as would be more expected when it is about a work of art - in order to express the most accurate way of naming the activity of both artists, because this is the term they personally used in the "75HP" Magazine to define their own artwork. 4 One of the first artists interested in defining and analysing "intermedia" in his "Essays On The Blurring Of Art And Life", Berkeley, etc.: University of California Press, 1993