Ruth Bernard Yeazell

Picture Titles: How and Why Western Paintings Acquired Their Names Ruth Bernard Yeazell

Marc Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index. Table of Contents:"List of Illustrations" ixPrologue (This is not a title) 1I Naming and Circulating: Middlemen1 Before Titles 192 Dealers and Notaries 253 Early Cataloguers 314 Academies 395 Printmakers 526 Curators, Critics, Friends--and More Dealers 66II Reading and Interpreting: Viewers7 Reading by the Title 818 The Power of a Name 979 Many Can Read Print 11010 Reading against the Title 124III Authoring as well as Painting: Artists11 The Force of David's Oath 14312 Turner's Poetic Fallacies 16613 Courbet's Studio as Manifesto 18314 Whistler's Symphonies and Other Instructive Arrangements 20415 Magritte and The Use of Words 22516 Johns's No and the Painted Word 243"Acknowledgments" 265"Notes" 267"Index" 315Jacket Description/Back:""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 UniversityPublisher Marketing: 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.

Contributor Bio:  Yeazell, Ruth Bernard 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).