The Picasso Papers

by Rosalind E. Krauss

Was Picasso a modern Midas who not only turned the trash of everyday life into the gold of Cubist collage but also gave new value to the work of Old Masters? Or was he a monster counterfeiter who mercilessly raided the styles of others? In The Picasso Papers , Rosalind Krauss suggests that the reason we still ask these questions is that modernism itself is a hall of mirrors in which "counterfeit" and "genuine" both reflect the same condition. Krauss brings Picasso's pastiche of other artists brilliantly into focus as the "sublimated" underbelly of Cubism, refashioned in the bright, clean style of Picasso's neoclassicism—a defense that is its own form of practicing the forbidden.

Genres: Art, Art History, Philosophy

272 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 1998

About the author

American art critic, professor, and theorist who is based at Columbia University, teaching Modern Art and Theory.

Reviews

[Jim Leckband · Rating 3 out of 5]

Refreshingly free of the worst of the deconstructionist/POMO drivel that came out of the 1990's, the majority of "The Picasso Papers" analyzes the genesis of the collages that Picasso created in 1912-1915. Krauss's stance is that Picasso is a serial chameleon who adopts styles not only to reinvigorate his own art but to broaden modernism's ways of seeing and creating.

When Picasso adopts the collage it is not only to create a new language of painting, but a new way of looking at the picture plane and it's response to reality. Is it a mirror or a replica? This is the genius of Picasso in that we are never sure. Cezanne made us question whether it is apples or paint that is the subject of the painting, Picasso makes the question the subject of the painting - and voila - modernism!

Krauss ends the book with a digression on the relation of Picasso's biography to his art. Specifically the role of his mistresses and wives in his "dime novel" situations he relished creating in his personal life in the output in his studio. I think Krauss is trying to make a point that Picasso's pastiche compulsion informed his affairs (he is recapitulating the sordidness of dime novels in his love life). And that real-life pastiche carried over to the pastiches he created of the art he made from the women in his life. To me this section was a bit overworked, and not as illuminating as the collage/cubism section was.

As a whole, I enjoyed the analysis Krauss brought to the collages and early Cubism of Picasso. She freshened up the art school pieties that we all got and I actually was able to look at them in a new way. I can't ask much more than that.

[Robin]

art,history