Synopses & Reviews
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.
Review
"Rosalind E. Krauss's short book consists of three brilliant essays."
—Jill Lloyd, Times Literary Supplement
Review
"The Picasso Papers is an extraordinary, and extraordinarily odd, book that views the schism in Picasso's production, which occurred after the outbreak of the first world war, as an inevitable corollary of modernism and modern society itself."
—Adrian Searle, The Guardian
Synopsis
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
Description
Includes bibliographical references (p. [242]-268) and index.
About the Author
Rosalind E. Krauss, University Professor at Columbia University and an editor and cofounder of October magazine, is the author of The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (1985), The Optical Unconscious (1993), The Picasso Papers (1999), and Bachelors (1999), all published by the MIT Press, and coauthor (with Yve-Alain Bois) of Formless: A User's Guide (Zone Books, 1997).