Signature

SIGNATURE

Final touch
The artist steps back to appreciate the prescence of the finished painting. A masterpiece, undoubtably. Nothing but the final touch left to do. A relatively small but important, one might say the most important, gesture. A script liner is dipped in turpentine and rolled deliberately through a dab of dark cadmium red paint. And voila – the artists ornate signature finds it’s place in the lower left corner. There – it’s complete!

A matter of vanity
There is nothing wrong with taking pride in yout work! It is said that Michelangelo himself snuck into the chapel where his Pieta recided and signed it after overhearing some visitors crediting it to a rival artist. Out of his almost 200 known works, this is the only one that he signed. Why didn’t he sign the other ones, you might ask. Well, it was simply not customary for artists at this time to leave their signature on their work, but this was about to change. During the renaissance the artists fought for, and enjoyed a growing social status. Focus shifted from the guilds to the individual artists and while technical acility was still recognised it became expected of the artists that they developed an individual style.

In the mid 1490s German artist Albrecht Dürer started signing his work. His AD monogram soon became so famous and valuable that other artists started copying it. Dürer, well aware of the status of his brand, took at least one of the copyists to court in what was probably the first ever copyright infringement case.

It’s the economy, stupid
Later, in the baroque era, and first and foremost during the Dutch golden age, the art critic and the art dealer saw the light of day. While artworks largely used to be commisions by royalty and clergy, the growing wealth of the Dutch merchant class contributed to the rise of a private art market on a scale that hadn’t been seen before. This meant that artists to a much larger degree had to think in terms of branding to be able to compete in this new and saturated market. There was still individual differences. Rembrandt always signed his work while Vermeer never signed a single painting. Rubens signed only five of his almost 400 known paintings. A group that would certainly have encouraged artists to sign their paintings was the art dealers. They quickly learned that signed art would sell for more than anonymous works. The buyer would of course like to brag about owning a painting by an esteemed artist. It would still take around two hundred years, until the birth of modernism, before artists started to reliably sign their work.

After the rise of mass media, some of the American abstract expressionists rose to a level of fame usually associated with rockstars. There was a fair bit of competition, not necessarily of the healthy kind, between these artists, and they did generally sign their work. It was a suitable way to pad their egos as well as their wallets.

Later, artists like Mark Rothko and Cy Twombly were finding it hard to fit a signature on the painting itself and sometimes signed the back or left the work unsigned. Since then, signing the back seems to have become the norm rather than the exeption.

To sign or not to sign
Signing accomplishes several things. Most buyers, both occational buyers and some high end collectors, generally seem to prefer signed works. A signature might aid future owners or art historians in identifying the artist. And for some artists it might serve as some kind of a ritual to declare the artwork finished and approved. On the other hand the records of most professional artists are quite good in this day and age, and information have never been more accsessible. You might argue that it simply doesn’t matter who the artist is, and that the artwork should be able to stand on its own. This is a somewhat valid argument, but obviously the entire art world disagrees - the art market, the museums, art historians and so forth.

A painting problem
Even though Michelangelo signed all the way across the front of his Pieta, most sculptures aren’t signed, and if they are, they’re almost allways signed underneath. Installations are often somewhat hard to sign, not to speak of performances. Conseptual artworks are sometimes nothing but a description, or reciepe if you will, and some kind of a signature, allthough it can hardly be said to be part of the work.

Traditional paintings are practically two dimentional, so there’s not many surfaces to choose from. If you want the signature to be visible, the surface of the painting itself is really your only choise. Personally I think of it the same way as I think of a plate of food. I like it to be visually appealing, but I don’t like things that are not edible, not food, on my plate. In the same way I don’t like things that are not artwork on my canvases. If you ever come across one of my paintings and spend your time looking for a signature, I would have to believe that I didn’t manage to make the painting interesting enough. You could rest asure though, that on the reverse, for those nerds amongst us who like the back of paintings allmost as much as the front, are some scribbles that somewhat resembles my name.