Is a picture worth a thousand words or not?

It’s often true that words hinder communication. Putting descriptive titles on paintings is a model for weakening a message. Clearly, some artists haven’t gotten the memo.

If art lovers are to be guided by explanatory titles, then art becomes little more than a visual aid, or worse - controversial for no good reason.

Andres Serrano title “Piss Christ” a photograph of a cross submerged in a jar urine, had unintended consequences. Without the title, the sunny glow of the urine lends incandescence to the cross, even splendor. If Serrano hadn’t named his image, it might have been interpreted as he intended: Christianity drowning in crassness, in commercialism.

Titling art too narrowly can have another sorry effect. It can beg the issue. “Icons of Loss,” the show title that holocaust survivor Samuel Bak gave his harrowing paintings, needlessly pushes the point, particularly since his works hang at the Florida Holocaust Museum.

Bak also titled each of his exhibit examples. How unnecessary are the labels? Even if you didn’t know that his painting series of a small boy with raised hands in a don’t-shoot pose is based on a Nazi photo documenting the liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto in ‘43, the imagery can leave you wrecked.

Not content with painting the boy bound with roped strips of splintered wood that form an “X,” Bak felt the need to title it “Crossed Out.” In a variation on the theme, Bak renders the boy in another work blindfolded and dissolving into the brick wall behind him. At this point, you can almost guess his title: “Walled In.”

This is a little like a film score that aims to manipulate the moviegoer with operatic sound. A lesser artist may need such devices, but Bak is too good a painter.

How good is he? In “Walled In,” he added a pictorial detail not found in the photograph: the boy’s socks sag, one already fallen around his ankles, leaving them at uneven heights. In this way, Bak wordlessly stresses that this is a small child under the gun.

Nicholas Ray did a similar thing when he directed the 1955 film “Rebel Without A Cause.” To heighten the drama of a boy accidentally killed by the police, Ray simply zoomed in on the dead boy’s unmatched socks. The sight was a silent reminder of innocence lost to death.

Lose the titles, Mr. Bak. Your pictures are enough to fasten viewers to the floor, as if standing at the edge of a hole.