‘Michel Butor’s 'Les Mots dans la peinture': A ‘Museum of Words’?’

Abstract

This article examines Michel Butor's 1969 work 'Les Mots dans la peinture', asserting that its inventive structure has been largely passed over by critics due to its primary use as a key text in word-image studies. Butor proposes to examine words in paintings in this work and in so doing, focuses at length on the museum space. I suggest that Butor’s text sets itself up as an imaginary art museum for its reader, and organises itself spatially in such a way as to emulate the visitor’s passage through an exhibition space. Butor thus creates what will be termed, following James A.W. Heffernan, a ‘museum of words’, ‘a gallery of art constructed by language alone’. In arguing that the museum space informs the structure as much as the content of 'Les Mots dans la peinture', my article also offers insights into the work's interrogation both of ekphrasis and the role of illustration. Moreover, this piece’s sensitivity to Butor’s poetic endeavours and experimentation with the essay form, as well as to his thoughts on the interconnected activities of writing, reading, and travelling, further challenges the way in which the aesthetic value of 'Les Mots dans la peinture' in its own right has long been overlooked