On the impossibility of stories: the anti-narrative and non-narrative impulse in modern painting

Abstract

Abstract In the wake of the sea change from ‘narrative’ to ‘iconic’ works that, according to William Rubin, is one of the hallmarks of early modernism, what has happened to the possibilities of narrative? Rubin suggests that after Picasso's rejection of narrative, style differences within paintings came to substitute for the articulations that had been provided by narrative- a hypothesis that works well for the three sorts of figures in the Women of Avignon, but which is only intermittently applicable to the majority of more recent painting, since it has not taken up Picasso's lead.1 Certainly narrative has not been 'replaced' in any intelligible fashion by ‘iconic’ images or by the pantheon of modernist ways of ‘writing’ in pictures — by pictographs, logographs, or any of our other hieratic, heraldic and lexigraphic configurations. We can say this immediately since neither icons nor ways of writing in pictures are simple opposites of narrative. They replace neither its possibilities nor our continuing desire to tell stories.