Invisible Colors: A Visual History of TitlesIn one of his sparkling aphorisms on the end of 'optical' art, Marcel Duchamp suggested that the title of an artwork was an 'invisible color'. John Welchman now offers the first critical history of how and why modern artworks receive their titles. He shows that titles were seldom produced and can rarely be understood outside of the institutional parameters that made them visible - exhibitions, criticism, catalogues, and even national politics. |
Contents
II | 29 |
Beyond Recognition | 41 |
Monet and the Development of a Nominative Effectualism | 61 |
Redon Gauguin Signac | 81 |
Exhibitions Numbers | 103 |
James McNeill Whistler The Elaboration | 121 |
Form Violence | 142 |
Cubic Language and the Philosophical Brothel | 152 |
Names Bodies Diagrams and CounterIdentities | 233 |
Magritte Miró Tanguy Matta | 239 |
Sounds Silences and Cognitive Naming | 265 |
Making In Spite | 277 |
Rethinking the Titular Metaphors | 284 |
Titles after Composition | 315 |
Notes on the Postmodern Title | 323 |
Untitling Anonymity | 339 |
Common terms and phrases
abstract Abstract Expressionism aesthetic Armory Show artists associated avant-garde Baudelaire captions catalogue Cézanne Cézanne's cited Clement Greenberg collage color composition connotative contemporary context critical Cubist Dada Demoiselles designation discourse discussion effects Ernst essay exhibition Fénéon formal formalist function Gallery Gauguin gestures Gombrich Greenberg Ibid Impressionist Incohérents inscription invested Joan Miró Kandinsky Kaprow kind label language later Les Demoiselles d'Avignon literary Magritte Malevich Marcel Duchamp material Matisse Matta Max Ernst metaphor Miró Modern Art modernist Mondrian Monet Museum musical nominal notes object offers painter painting Paris Paul Gauguin Picabia Picasso pictorial picture Piet Mondrian poetic Pollock portrait practice predicated Press production Readymade Redon reference relation Robert Smithson Rubin Salon sculpture Signac signature signifying social space Stella suggests Suprematism Surrealist symbolic Symbolist textual theory tion titular activity traditional untitled visual modernism visual-textual Wassily Kandinsky Whistler words writing York