The author's concern is both with a general theoretical question - the relationship between painting and poetry, between the visual and the verbal - and with a specific period of artistic history - the early years of the twentieth century, when Cubism flourished. Rather than seeing any conflict or irreconcilable division between painting and poetry, Scobie proposes, as a model for their relation, the Derridean notion of 'the supplement.' This relation is grounded in the pervasiveness of language, in the ways in which language surrounds, imbues, structures, and supplements both verbal and nonverbal images.