On Sunday, Oct. 22 at 4:30 p.m., Greenwich Library partners with the Yale Alumni Association of Greenwich to present Yale professor Ruth Bernard Yeazell. Yeazell, a popular member of Yale’s Department of English, will deliver an audiovisual presentation based on her recent book, Picture Titles: How and Why Western Paintings Acquired Their Names (2015). The event will be held in the Library’s Cole Auditorium.
A picture’s title is often the first clue to understanding an image. Yet paintings didn’t always have titles, and many canvases acquired their names from curators, dealers, printmakers, even the artists’ friends — not the artists. Drawing on material from her recent book on the subject, Yeazell will talk about how the practice of naming pictures 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. Her presentation will be interdisciplinary, a crossover discussion linking literature, commerce and painting. The talk will be illustrated with examples of the paintings she is discussing.
Ruth Bernard Yeazell is Chace Family Professor of English at Yale. Her research and teaching focus on the novel from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, the history of gender and sexuality, and the relations of literature to the visual arts. As a teacher and critic, she is concerned with the way works of art both respond to and imaginatively transform their culture. She enjoys writing on a variety of literary and other topics for a wider public in the New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books and elsewhere. Yeazell received her B.A. in English from Swarthmore College and her M.Phil and Ph.D. in English Language and Literature from Yale University.
Co-sponsored by Yale Alumni Association of Greenwich (YAAG) and Greenwich Library. Open to all at no charge. Registration is recommended on the Library’s website at greenwichlibrary.org
