The Picasso Papers

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by Rosalind E. Krauss

MIT Press

Due/Published February 1999, 288 pages, paper

ISBN 0262611422

New in paper! (S99)

Maybe you know Rosalind E. Krauss from the pages of October, but here she is with a reevaluation of Picasso in the course of which she is lead to ask whether modernism is itself a hall of mirrors in which counterfeit and genuine are nto opposites but two sides of the same condition. Revealing Picasso's collage as a play of voices, Krauss shows that no single voice is "authentic" or sanctioned by its author. Picasso's pastiche of other artists, however, is brilliantly brought into focus as the "sublimated" underbelly of cubism, rewritten in the bright, clean style of Picasso's neoclassicism.

Review

Though this is a subject art historians seemingly never tire writing of, Krauss's new study is a valuable addition to works on Picasso. Krauss enters the debate over Picasso's legacy -- brilliant, original artist vs. monster counterfeiter. She reinvestigates his Cubist collages, suggesting that should be viewed as plays of different voices. In a review of the book, Arthur C. Danto writes, "I am deeply enlightened by Rosalind Krauss's The Picasso Papers, and by its plausible methodology, which treats the art and the life as if a double helix, as a complex whole. In much recent writing on Picasso, the art has become an epiphenomenon of the artist's life. But the causal truth is more intricate and the decision to approach it through the early collages is brilliant."