The second line in our image caption example reads "Soir Bleu, 1914." This tells us that Edward Hopper named his painting Soir Bleu ("Blue Evening") and that he painted the canvas in 1914.
Variations on the title theme include:
- Fantastically long titles, as with Hannah Höch's Cut with the Kitchen Knife through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany.
- Titles that include two names: that given by the artist in his or her native tongue, and its English translation in parentheses.
- The wildly popular Untitled, which may be followed by a digit or Roman numeral (example: Willem de Kooning's Untitled XII), or its commonly used nickname (example: Hans Arp's Untitled [Forest]).
- No given title whatsoever - and this comes up with increasing frequency the further one travels backwards into history. Instead of a title, you'll see a bare-bones description of an object or artifact created by an unknown artist, as is the case with Head of a Statue (Achaemenid Persian).
We historians are always happiest when a specific date of execution (like this painting's "1914") is known, but exact information isn't always available. Not every artist dated his or her work, records are frequently lost and, again, as we go back in time there often are no records. If this inexact situation applies, the "date" bit of the work's title will typically include "ca."
However, if a work of art is really old, you'll get some historic period that covers many-to-thousands of years in addition (or not) to the relatively specific "ca." You will usually be supplied with the location in which this object was discovered or (more often) excavated by one or more archaeologists, too. One example of this would be Ram in the Thicket (or Ram Caught in a Thicket) (Mesopotamian, ca. 2650-2550 B.C.). Found in the "Great Death Pit" at Ur.
