Picasso, Cubism, and Reflexivity

Abstract

The interpretation of Cubism has a great bearing on the understanding of modernism, and the understanding of modernism plays in turn a central role in most of twentieth-century art to this day. Yet only a narrow range of views regarding precisely how an overall interpretation of Cubism may relate to the art of the last hundred years has emerged. One is that Cubism was the cornerstone of twentieth-century art because it broke with past tradition definitively; established “modernist” flatness, opticality, and involvement with the medium of art; and thus sanctioned a new tradition that would lead to nonobjective art as well as to assemblage and to other “modernist” principles and practices. This essentially formalist view has now been supplemented, but not displaced, by what might be called a linguistic or semiological position, whereby Cubism becomes the first, pioneering exemplar of a “modernist” play of signs, which refer not to the exterior world but to other signs and to other works of art. What both th...