Two girls are playing on the beach. One is dipping her foot into a black pool of water left by an ebbing grey sea. Both are turned away from us, absorbed, as so many of ’s subjects are, in thoughts to which viewers are not privy. I can’t help but project what I know of Yiadom-Boakye on to the picture, not least that she studied painting in Falmouth, so, this chilly study in greys, blacks and browns, is probably inspired by Cornish beaches. I look to the title for guidance: Condor and the Mole. What can that mean? Perhaps the toe-dipper is the condor – she’s flinging her arms out balletically as if she were a broad-winged bird poised to take flight and her friend – is what? – an earthbound mole? But surely she isn’t a mole – there’s nothing subterranean about her at all; in her orange skirt and white top, she’s the light that disrupts the darkling colour scheme. Or perhaps I’ve got this all wrong: maybe the mole is the pool of water, rising to the surface, touching the condor girl’s toe as God’s finger touched Adam’s in Michelangelo’s famed work. And that leads me on to madder thoughts: maybe condor girl has struck oil in Cornwall and Jeremy Hunt needn’t worry about reducing the government debt. As I walked around Tate Britain’s beguiling retrospective of the British painter’s work I kept looking at the titles. Not because the pictures need verbal help – there’s enough in her pictures of imagined subjects to feed the hungriest eyes. No, it’s because Yiadom-Boakye clearly gets a kick out of writing titles. And that pleasure is infectious. She calls her titles “an extra brush mark”, but not explanations: “Any attempts at explanation can become at best superfluous; at worst wholly inaccurate.” All the way through the show, her titles intriguingly wrongfooted me. Maybe they’re nonsense, or maybe, even against the artist’s intention, they send the viewer down a rabbit-hole of misguided but fun interpretation. That’s certainly what I did with such titles as Tie the Temptress to the Trojan; To Improvise a Mountain; and The Cream and the Taste. And then there was Alabaster for Infidels, one of a handful of new works that was not in the first, Covid-truncated iteration of the Tate Britain retrospective in 2020. It depicts two men, one seated, the other in striped trousers holding a glass of water or perhaps milk. Are the two men the infidels, and are the two white items – the glass and the Morandi-like jug – the alabaster? Or are these men, soothing to contemplate, cool alabaster for us infidels to contemplate? And if the latter, why am I an infidel? And you needn’t look so smug. Presumably you’re an infidel, too. In Yiadom-Boakye’s titles, words become unmoored from the painting. Which is fair enough, you might think: a painting that needs words to tell you what it is can’t be a very good painting. It should be a world intact, perhaps a visual expression of the unwritable. That’s why, no doubt, so many artists have plumped for anti-nominative puritanism, with artists as varied as Donald Judd and Jean-Michel Basquiat among those who’ve called some works Untitled. But while the anti-title of Judd’s row of ascending shelves sculpture seems justified, since it needs no further explanation, I’d have liked to know whose skull Basquiat was painting in a 1982 work that, even if has no title, comes with a hefty price tag: in May 2017, it sold for $110.5m at Sotheby’s. Yiadom-Boakye plays with the idea that what can be said in paint is in a different language from what is said in words and perhaps the former can’t be translated to the latter. She says: “I write about things I can’t paint and I and paint the things I can’t write about.” But her oeuvre, in a sense, is a double unmooring. Her titles don’t seem to connect obviously to the paintings; and, programmatically, her paintings don’t connect to reality. “I learned how to paint from looking at painting,” Yiadom-Bakye says. She is painting imaginary people, though they are no less potent, endearing subjects for all that. Paintings used to be simpler. They depicted reality and titles identified which bit of reality was depicted. But the latter is a recent development. In Picture Titles: How and Why Western Paintings Acquired Their Names, Ruth Yeazell argues that before the 18th century in Europe, artists did not need to title their works because most art stayed in one place and depicted things their owners didn’t need to name. If paintings did have titles, often artists didn’t write them. The Mona Lisa wasn’t the name Leonardo gave to his portrait, but Vasari’s; what we know as Rembrandt’s Night Watch was originally called Militia Company of District II under the Command of Captain Frans Banninck Cocq. Only with the rise of auction houses and public galleries in the 18th century did titles become useful handles, necessary to organise submissions. But later something deranging happened. Painting broke the compact with reality. One day someone complained to Picasso that he ought to make pictures of things the way they are. The person produced a photograph of his wife from his wallet and said: “There, you see. That is a picture of how she really is.” Picasso looked at it and said: “She is rather small, isn’t she? And flat?” Magritte’s 1929 painting of a pipe is entitled The Treachery of Images and bears the legend Ceci n’est pas une pipe which, though true, isn’t very helpful. Nowadays, just as pictures aren’t very good guides to reality, so titles have become unreliable guides to paintings. Michael Baldwin’s 1965 deconstruction of depiction is called Untitled Painting. But the title is inaccurate: it isn’t a painting; it’s a mirror, reflecting you, most likely looking confused. Consider the case of Matt Adrian. In one picture a couple of blue birds rendered in acrylic paint perch very close to each other at the bottom of a wood panel. Title? “She drunkenly approached me in a bar, asked if I would ‘do her a rudeness’ – and your mother and I have been together ever since.” Hold on, Matt: are these supposed to be talking birds now? In another picture, a bird stares with predatory mien. Title? “Dakota has recently proclaimed that she is a reincarnated 15th century serial killer, so I’m cancelling all scheduled playdates until further notice.” Adrian also paints a pair of lovely owls, possibly nodding off on their perches. Title? “The dreadfully delightful existence of semi-spectral things.” That last title reminds me of one of Damien Hirst’s leading contributions to art, his verbose titles. The title of Hirst’s The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, seems to advance a dubious philosophical argument rather than tell you what you’re looking at, namely a 14-foot tiger shark immersed in formaldehyde. Jake and Dinos Chapman, not to be outdone, arranged nine display cases in a swastika shape, each one filled with thousands of plastic figures being bloodied, dismembered, throttled, impaled or beheaded. The work replaced Hell, their installation that was destroyed in the disastrous 2004 Momart warehouse fire. Title? If Hitler Had Been a Hippy How Happy Would We Be. Of course it is. Perhaps any disconnect between titles and their works is Marcel Duchamp’s fault. In 1919 he did a readymade consisting of a postcard of the Mona Lisa, on whose face he drew a moustache and beard and called the result LHOOQ. If you say those letters in French aloud, it sounds like “elle a chaud au cul”, or, roughly, “She’s got a hot arse”. Which may be true, though given Leonardo painted the Mona Lisa four centuries earlier and you can’t in any case see the sitter’s bottom, it’s anybody’s guess how Duchamp came to that opinion. In these very Tate Britain galleries where Yiadom-Boakye’s retrospective is on show, a quarter of a century ago, I saw another retrospective devoted to the late American artist RB Kitaj. They showed the perils of verbosity. His paintings each came with not just titles but explanatory notes on which I spent more time than the actual art. Even Kitaj’s titles were sometimes too much. Consider Desk Murder (formerly The Third Department (a Test Study)). As Oscar Wilde might have put it, to have one set of brackets in a painting’s title might be considered a misfortune; two looks like carelessness. Other titles were discombobulatingly disconnected from whatever was going on in the enchanting paintings, such as The Apotheosis of Groundlessness or Where the Railroad Leaves the Sea or, the totally confusing, If Not, Not. I remember spending a good while in front of a painting called The Autumn of Central Paris (after Walter Benjamin), not just trying to grasp the meaning of the title, but also the accompanying essay in which Kitaj, ever well-read and ready to show it, cited Flaubert and described how Benjamin was hounded out of Paris to his suicide in 1940. “Benjamin thrills me because he does not cohere, and beautifully.” Perhaps that is true of not just Benjamin but of the relationship between paintings and their titles. Kitaj was savaged by British critics, damned for, among other supposed failings, that very verbosity. The artist took it personally, claiming Brits had effectively killed his second wife, the painter Sandra Fisher, who died shortly after the exhibition. In 1997, he made a painting called The Killer-Critic Assassinated by His Widower, Even which was shown in the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition. The title alone showed that the cultured Kitaj knew his history – that “even” is a quote of course from Duchamp, and the painting itself, depicting the artist shooting, is drawn from Manet’s The Execution of Maximilian. At the top of the picture he wrote out TS Eliot’s remark “Art is the escape from personality”. But Kitaj crossed out the “from” and replaced it with “to”, as if he found, in exacting symbolic revenge in painting, who he was – an incorrigible blabbermouth. Yiadom-Boakye hardly talks too much, but I wonder if she’s quite right in suggesting that a title is just an extra brush stroke. For me, her titles do more. They sometimes baffle, sometimes help, but always invite me to take my appreciations of her beautiful pictures in unexpected directions, directions that may contradict whatever it was, if anything, she sought to express. Because that’s one fate of painting: the artist may get the last brush stroke, but not the last word. Fly in League With the Night is at Tate Britain, London, until 26 February.