Contemporary preoccupations in the visual arts have recently returned to the fore “literary” problematics which Modernism had erased or considered minor. Their genealogy implies the issue of how to place words in space and its displacement, in the 1900, from the field of poetry writing (Mallarmé, Roussel, Joyce) to that of the visual arts (Duchamp). The study sketches the outline of this tradition of turning words into form which, current in the second half of the 20th century, from Edward Ruscha to Marcel Broodthaers, is now reinventing itself through the works of a Josef Strau.