Picture Titles: How and Why Western Paintings Acquired Their Names, by Ruth Bernard Yeazell
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Picture Titles: How and Why Western Paintings Acquired Their Names, by Ruth Bernard Yeazell
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A picture's title is often our first guide to understanding the image. Yet paintings didn't always have titles, and many canvases acquired their names from curators, dealers, and printmakers--not the artists. Taking an original, historical look at how Western paintings were named, Picture Titles shows how the practice developed in response to the conditions of the modern art world and how titles have shaped the reception of artwork from the time of Bruegel and Rembrandt to the present.
Ruth Bernard Yeazell begins the story with the decline of patronage and the rise of the art market in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as the increasing circulation of pictures and the democratization of the viewing public generated the need for a shorthand by which to identify works at a far remove from their creation. The spread of literacy both encouraged the practice of titling pictures and aroused new anxieties about relations between word and image, including fears that reading was taking the place of looking. Yeazell demonstrates that most titles composed before the nineteenth century were the work of middlemen, and even today many artists rely on others to name their pictures. A painter who wants a title to stick, Yeazell argues, must engage in an act of aggressive authorship. She investigates prominent cases, such as David's Oath of the Horatii and works by Turner, Courbet, Whistler, Magritte, and Jasper Johns.?????
Examining Western painting from the Renaissance to the present day, Picture Titles sheds new light on the ways that we interpret and appreciate visual art.
Picture Titles: How and Why Western Paintings Acquired Their Names, by Ruth Bernard Yeazell - Amazon Sales Rank: #840002 in Books
- Published on: 2015-09-29
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.30" h x 1.30" w x 5.90" l, .0 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 352 pages
Picture Titles: How and Why Western Paintings Acquired Their Names, by Ruth Bernard Yeazell Review One of The New Yorker's "The Books We Loved in 2015" (selected by Ben Lerner)"I was fascinated by Ruth Bernard Yeazell's book Picture Titles: How and Why Western Paintings Acquired Their Names. As a writer who is often jealous of visual artists, I found her exploration of how titles inflect our experiences of viewing perversely reassuring--I mean as evidence of the power a text can hold over an image."--Ben Lerner, New Yorker"This fascinating study shows how the naming of paintings was inextricably tied to the rise of the art market in the 17th and 18th centuries."--Apollo Magazine"Yeazell's work is undoubtedly one of serious scholarship, stuffed to the margins with historical and critical analysis. . . . Where Yeazell's analysis succeeds most is in its insistence that we consider something that seems so ordinary--a wall label, photo caption, or Google Images description--with consideration of those words' creator and with an awareness of how those words profoundly affect our perception."--Grace Labatt, Santa Fe New Mexican"That titles are somehow intrinsic to all artworks is an idea that is mistaken but frequently espoused. Welcome clarification of this fact comes with Ruth Bernard Yeazell's new book, Picture Titles: How and Why Western Paintings Acquired Their Names. This is an important study."--Thomas Marks, Apollo Magazine
From the Back Cover
"Picture Titles is more than just a historical account of how and why pictures came to be named, and of how and why these names sometimes changed over time--it also explores how the act of bestowing a title on a picture influences the ways we approach and apprehend it. After reading this highly original and beautifully written book, you will never look at another picture in quite the same way again."--David Cannadine, author of The Undivided Past: Humanity beyond Our Differences
"Between emblematic text banners in medieval painting and conceptualist works that are all caption, Picture Titles tracks the emergence and rapid evolution of named pictures and inquires into the mutating claims of 'painter as author.' Invitingly erudite and anecdotal at once, this short history is long on explanatory grip. Works by artists as different as David and Courbet, Magritte and Johns, get read anew through the logic of appellation itself."--Garrett Stewart, University of Iowa
"This is a terrific book. It's very well argued, intellectually provocative, and immensely enjoyable. No one who reads it will ever again consider a painting's title as something incidental and to be taken for granted. In many ways, Yeazell tells the history of Western art consumption through this hugely important topic."--Kate Flint, University of Southern California
"Picture Titles is an eloquent and deeply researched book on a subject that is deserving of a more focused attention than it has received in the past. Raising interesting questions about the relation between verbal and pictorial literacy, this book will have many appreciative readers in a range of different disciplines."--Leonard Barkan, Princeton University
About the Author Ruth Bernard Yeazell is the Chace Family Professor of English and director of the Lewis Walpole Library at Yale University. Her books include Harems of the Mind: Passages of Western Art and Literature and Art of the Everyday: Dutch Painting and the Realist Novel (Princeton).
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Most helpful customer reviews
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful. Whistler's Mother? By Christian Schlect Professor Ruth Bernard Yeazell writes clearly and well about a sometimes simple, sometimes complex matter: titles of paintings.I found the the historical background to why and how titles emerged for works of European art to be quite interesting. The author then goes to an examination of the use of descriptive and naming words by several major artists (Courbet, David,Magritte, Whistler, and John). I especially liked the chapter devoted to James McNeill Whistler, the one on Jasper Johns less so.A good purchase for one deeply interested in the cultural aspects of Western paintings.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful. What's in a Name? By Rob Hardy In _Life on the Mississippi_, Mark Twain digresses on the importance of titles of paintings, in particular while telling us about the picture “The Last Meeting of Lee and Jackson.” While acknowledging the picture’s importance because of its authentic portraits of the two men, Twain says the label is important to a historical picture, but only to get the personnel right, and he proposes other titles that would do just as well: “First Interview between Lee and Jackson”, “Last Interview between Lee and Jackson”, “Jackson Apologizing for a Heavy Defeat”, “Jackson Reporting a Great Victory”, or “Jackson Asking Lee for a Match”. Ruth Bernard Yeazell, in _Picture Titles: How and Why Western Paintings Acquired Their Names_ (Princeton University Press) doesn’t mention Twain’s thoughts on the arbitrariness of this picture’s title, but goes on to mention his further thoughts on a famous seventeenth century picture by Guido Reni of a young woman that bore the title, “Beatrice Cenci the Day before Her Execution”. Though even in Twain’s day the subject and the attribution of the artist of the picture were being questioned, people were still moved by Beatrice’s story of martyrdom and were even tearful before her portrait. It isn’t a sad picture; it merely shows a pretty young woman in a turban. “It shows what a label can do,” wrote Twain. “If they did not know the picture, they would inspect it unmoved and say, “Young girl with hay fever; young girl with her head in a bag.”If he painted that picture, Reni didn’t give it its title. One of the surprises of Yeazell’s book is that artists didn’t get around to giving their pictures names routinely until the nineteenth century. Pictures were just pictures without titles, but by the eighteenth century, changes in displaying, inventorying, and selling pictures necessitated attaching names. Yeazell’s research shows that “middlemen” such as auctioneers and cataloguers were often responsible for titles now fastened firmly to their pictures. Other middlemen were the printmakers. Among the most successful printmakers in the eighteenth century was Jean Georges Wille in Paris, whose reproductions were found in homes all over Europe. One of the most famous was his print of a 1654 painting by Gerard ter Borch. Wille titled his 1765 engraving “L’instruction Paternelle” or “The Paternal Admonition.” He had interpreted the tableau of three figures - a young woman, a man who raises his hand in an ambiguous gesture, and an older woman sipping from a glass of wine - as a familial scene, and so his print got its title. When the print became famous, the name became attached to the painting from which it was drawn; Goethe himself composed a narrative inspired by the painting, but more by the title. We have, however, no way of knowing what ter Borch had in mind for that narrative behind the painting. Hilariously, the scholarly consensus of interpretation had shifted within the twentieth century. That was no father, mother, and daughter, but rather a client, procuress, and courtesan within an upscale bordello.Obviously a title made a difference, though, and once titles did start getting fixed to paintings, artists wanted a say-so in the business. Yeazell’s final chapters are essays on how particular artists used, or failed to use, titles to explain, or obscure, their work. Picasso had little interest in titles, declaring that a painting could speak for itself. Whistler so disliked the idea of a title being fixed to the subject of a painting that he assigned his works musical titles, like “Symphony in White,” prompting _Punch_ to print a parody cartoon labeled “An Arrangement in Fiddle-de-dee.” René Magritte chose titles that would make his paintings even more strange. His famous declaration written below a painting of a pipe, “Ceci n’est pas une pipe,” is not the title of the picture, which is “La trahison des images” or “The Treachery of Images.” Let’s let Jackson Pollock have the last word in this review of Yeazell’s academic but entertaining work. He painted a colorful abstract and called it “Moby Dick.” Patron Peggy Guggenheim didn’t care for the title, and so a curator renamed the picture “Pasiphaë.” You can be excused for not knowing the derivation; Pasiphaë is far less famous than Moby Dick. She was the wife of King Minos who cuckolded him with a bull and gave birth to the Minotaur. Pollock acquiesced to the name change, but only after expressing surprise: “Who the hell is Pasiphaë?”
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