Acknowledgments

This work is an outgrowth of many years of research in the field of contemporary art theory and criticism which led to the founding in 1980 of the Groupe de recherche en semiologie des arts visuels (GRESAV) at the Université du Québec à Montréal. A preliminary version was published in English by the Toronto Semiotic Circle Pre-publication series in 1985. Published in French in 1987, Sémiologie du langage visuel was translated with the financial help of the Université du Quebec à Montréal. I wish to extend my deepest thanks to all of these, as well as to those who assisted me in the most critical task of translation, James D. Campbell and Eileen B. Collins. I am also in debt to colleagues and students in GRESAV whose passion for the problematics of visual representations and timely criticisms has helped this grammatical theory of visual language to take form. Naturally it would seem utopian to try to assess the contribution to this research of more than thirty years of exchanges and discussions with my husband, the artist Guido Molinari.