Signs of the artist : signatures and self-expression in American paintings / John Wilmerding

European precedents -- American history, still life, and landscape -- Genre and later still-life painting -- Impressionism and realism -- Modernism.

Signatures are unique and often reveal something of our individual personalities. In this book, John Wilmerding - an eminent historian of American art - explores the unconventional use of signatures in paintings. The author focuses on American artists who have not simply signed their works on a corner of the canvas but intentionally placed their signatures within the pictorial space of the painting. A painter's name or initials might, for instance, appear as an illusion on a wall or floor, on an object within an interior, or on a form in a landscape. Wilmerding considers the significance of such signatures in works by twenty-seven American artists, from the eighteenth through twentieth centuries, who projected themselves into their art in tantalizing ways.

English