TITRES - UNE HISTOIRE DE L'ART ET DE LA LITTERATURE MODERNES - ILLUSTRATIONS, NOIR ET BLANC

This study proposes to explore, for the first time, how protagonists of modern art and literature titled their works. Although it was in the mid-19th century that painters began giving their works names that were more than just conventional titles, the history of using titles began much earlier for writers and poets. This work retraces the way in which words came to emulate images from 1890 through the 1920s.

By comparing and contrasting the practices developed by Paul Gauguin with those of Alfred Jarry, Paul Cézanne with Émile Zola, André Gide with Henri Matisse, Guillaume Apollinaire with Pablo Picasso, Francis Picabia with Tristan Tzara, and André Breton with Max Ernst, Donatien Grau sheds light on a polarity between two traditions: one that focuses solely on the form used (poem or painting) while ignoring context, and the other that views the pictorial or literary work of art as a political matrix existing only in its relation to the public space.

By examining some masterpieces, as well as a few little-known and previously unpublished documents, taking into account the individual paths of each figure evoked, this work presents a new genealogy of literary and pictorial practices from the vantage point of titles. Indeed, the naming of their works by painters and writers—the source of innumerable inventions—turns out to be the main tool that they share: images and texts also bear titles, and it is a sign of the freedom enjoyed by modern artists that they can devise them. Taking modern art titles seriously may well offer the key to understanding the close ties between the arts in a canonical era, about which much remains to be learned.

Donatien Grau is the Counselor on Contemporary Programming for the Presidency of the Musées d’Orsay and de l’Orangerie. He holds a PhD in the Philosophy of Modern Literature from Oxford University. He penned Tout contre Sainte-Beuve (Grasset, 2013, recipient of the Prix François-Victor Noury awarded by Institut de France); Le Roman romain : Généalogie d’un genre français (Les Belles Lettres, 2016); co-authored, with Emanuele Coccia, Le Musée transitoire : Sur 10 Corso Como (Klincksieck, 2018); and Dans la bibliothèque de la vie (Grasset, 2019).