A title is like extra paint.

Not an original quote but one that really struck me,  it was imparted to me at Newlyn School of art but I forget the original derivation.  Its an interesting idea,  i.e. that the title of a painting (or indeed anything) can impart an extra layer of meaning onto a piece.  It is something I have been thinking about quite a lot since I heard about it.  Some titles are of course strictly functional i.e.  Haystacks at Dusk.  Or Portrait of a Society Lady.  These do add a bit of an extra layer but they are more simply labels by which to identify the painting rather than adding anything to the art itself.  Often of course these titles are not given by the artist themselves but by later collectors, museums archivists as a way of identifying the works.

You may well be thinking that this is a modern phenomenon, used for abstract and conceptual pieces (more of which later).  But I think it has a resonance before that. Sometimes of course it is to tell you what you are looking at, a mythical or religious scene (and again I suppose many of these titles were applied afterwards).
 Difficult to know if it was conscious decision but for example Turner was good at titles.  His masterpiece (and one of my favourite paintings) The Fighting Temeraire is a good example.  The painting itself if you haven’t seen it is a ghostly softly lit painting of an old sailing warship being towed by a tug.  It is being towed for scrap.  Now he could of course have called it Ship being towed for scrap, but by calling it the Fighting Temeraire it adds an extra mournful wistful quality to the painting, at least I think so.

This idea of course acquires extra significance as soon as you move into abstract and conceptual art.  And of course some artists want to avoid this imposition of an additional meaning so you get things being called Untitled (although as above they often end up being given a name),  or as in the case of Pollock, simply the date the painting was completed.  Even doing that you are saying something of course,  you are saying something about how you think the work should be regarded. There is I think a certain amount of pretentiousness about it, it smacks of self importance, or sometimes simply of laziness.  This is probably a personal bias because I like a title.  Some of them are quite poetic.

Some of them of course overcook it and become far to pretentious in their own right.). And of course some of them do cause you to re-assess the piece of work significantly. I like that sensation actually,  you see a piece of art, you see the title and then it can be like you see a different piece of art.