Picasso: Style and Meaning by Elizabeth Cowling; Picasso and the Invention of Cubism by Pepe

Karmel; A Sum of Destructions: Picasso's Cultures and the Creation of Cubism by Natasha
Staller; Picasso: The Cubist Portraits of Fernande Olivier by Jeffrey Weiss; Valerie Fletcher;
Kathryn A. Tuma
Review by: Lisa Florman
The Art Bulletin, Vol. 86, No. 3 (Sep., 2004), pp. 614-620
Published by: College Art Association
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614 ART BULLETIN SEPTEMBER 2004 VOLUME LXXXVI NUMBER 3

Haven: Yale University Press, 2000). On the impact There is a passage in his book Farewell to an something new about Cubism at large will
of the Commune on the arts, see Albert Boime, Art Idea, in the chapter on Cubism, where T. J. need to bear in mind that that "movement"
and theFrench Commune:Imagining Paris after Warand
Clark pauses to clarify a description he has was little more (and, again, decidedly no less)
Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
just offered apropos of Pablo Picasso's paint- than an accumulation of specific works.
1995).
2. Clayson resorts to some rather questionable ing "MaJolie.""Let me be clear," Clark writes. Over the past few years, a number of new
accounts of Cubism have appeared, each of
logic in her effort to tie Regnault's watercolors to
the siege, as when she suggests that the male figure When I talk about "local acts of illusion- them claiming to show us something about
may be a Turco (an indigenous Algerian recruited ism" in the case of "MaJolie"... I mean the work that previous scholarship had over-
by the French army) even though his attire bears no the overall play of light and shade in the looked.4 Of the four books under review
relation to the uniform of the Turcos, and then
picture, the intersection and overlap of here-one a catalogue for a sharply focused
reads meaning into Regnault's "decision" not to
planes, spaces and directions.... I mean a exhibition, one a general monograph on Pi-
represent his uniform: "his willful recostuming and
dehistoricization by Regnault are what count" (p. certain kind or degree of complexity, a casso, and the other two ambitious studies
255). A less convoluted explanation would be that seeming openness of each mark to correc- (both originating as dissertations) that con-
he simply is not a Turco. The richest, albeit the tion, a nuance and precision in the whole centrate on the formation of Picasso's Cubist
most speculative, of Clayson's suggestions is that fabric of touches; or a quality to the idiom-some measure up to Clark's criteria
Hassan and Namouna evinces an erotic investment
touches that does not seem to make sense much better than do others. They reach a
that might indirectly express Regnault's attachment
to his artistic companion Georges Clairin (p. 272). except as nuance and precision, even if we notable consensus on one point: namely, that
3. A productive model for such looking is offered cannot see what provokes them; the effort Picasso, and not Georges Braque, was respon-
by Kristin Ross's reading of Arthur Rimbaud's texts
after effort apparently to "fix" some defi- sible for the real interest and difficulty of the
in relation to the Commune and its remaking of the nite but elusive phenomenon-"here," work produced during their collaboration.5
everyday; Ross, The Emergenceof Social Space:Rimbaud "now," "like this"-and plot its relation to Beyond that, however, there is remarkably
and the Paris Commune (Minneapolis: University of others around it/behind it/belonging to little agreement among the texts; approach-
Minnesota Press, 1988).
it, and so on. ... These efforts can only be ing their subject from very different angles,
4. For a similar interpretation, see Milner (as in
n. 1), 109.
understood, it seems to me, as efforts at they also leave us with very different senses of
illusionism.... And I take it that they are what Cubism is or had been all about.
5. Michel Foucault, "Fantasia of the Library," in
readable only in the terms provided by the Of the four, Pepe Karmel's book, Picasso
Language, Counter-Memory,Practice, ed. Donald F.
Bouchard (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, tradition they come out of: looking at and theInventionof Cubism,strikes me as the
1980), 87-109. them locally, we apply the usual tests of one most worth arguing with. If that sounds
6. T. J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in vividness; but somehow, finally ("really," like a backhanded compliment, it is intended
the Art of Manet and His Followers (London: Thames profoundly) the performance of matters is as a compliment nonetheless. Karmel's is the
and Hudson, 1985); Carol Armstrong, "Manet/ most serious and comprehensive account of
supposed not to be read in these
Manette: Encoloring the I/Eye," Stanford Humanities terms-or not merely in these terms. Cubism to date and, as such, it will undoubt-
Review 2, nos. 2-3 (spring 1992): 1-46; and idem,
Manet Manette (New Haven: Yale University Press, Look again, the picture says, look beyond edly have a major impact on the field. It also
2002). the details to the totality! But how, exactly? at least aims to adhere to something like
7. Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception:Atten- With what criteria? If the totality does not Clark's guidelines, proceeding work by work,
tion, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge, come out of the details, then where does it detail by detail-chronologically, in this case,
Mass.: MIT Press, 1999); and Norman Bryson, Tra- come from?l so as to track Cubism's formal development.
dition and Desire:FromDavid to Delacroix (Cambridge: Karmel justifies his concentration on formal
Cambridge University Press, 1984). I am tempted to read this passage not only as matters (to my mind, sensibly enough) by
8. See Alastair Wright, Matisse and the Subject of a description of the particular difficulties noting that
Modernism (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2004). posed by "MaJolie" (and a good number of
other Cubist paintings from approximately [a] great variety of meanings-philosoph-
the same date) but also as an allegory for the ical, political or biographical-can be dis-
near impossibility of writing about Cubism as covered in Cubist paintings and sculp-
ELIZABETH COWLING a whole, of offering any totalizing scheme or tures. But, for the most part, these
Picasso: Style and Meaning theory able to account for all of the "local" meanings might equally well have been
New York: Phaidon Press, 2002. 704 pp.; details that each individual painting (and communicated in some other, more con-
507 color ills., 119 b/w. $125.00; $49.95 sculpture and papier collk) represents. Like ventional way. The truly new and distinc-
the illusionistic passages of "Ma Jolie," the tive feature of Cubism is its formal lan-
paper
body of work we call Cubism is inconsistent guage. The goal of [my] book is to show
PEPE KARMEL and contradictory- elusive because marked how Picasso invented that language in the
Picasso and the Invention of Cubism by abrupt shifts in direction and interest. Yet, years 1906 through 1913. (p. viii)
as Clark himself acknowledges, however im-
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003.
possible the task of totalization, the test of any Rather than following a strictly linear progres-
240 pp.; 30 color ills., 250 b/w. $60.00
account of Cubism must still necessarily be sion, however, Karmel divides his study into
NATASHA STALLER
how it does or does not "hang together as a four chapters-"Ideas," "Spaces," "Bodies,"
whole." It needs to be measured by its overall and "Signs"-the first of which lays the con-
A Sum of Destructions: Picasso's Cultures
economy and relevance: "the kinds of pur- ceptual groundwork on which he sees Cubism
and the Creation of Cubism chase it has on particulars: what features of as having been built, while the other three
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001. Cubist painting it is able to discriminate and, isolate the development of some particular
438 pp.; 70 color ills., 258 b/w. $50.00 above all, to connect: whether those features aspect or element of Picasso's Cubist work.
seem to the viewer and reader the ones in One of the larger questions that will eventu-
JEFFREY WEISS, VALERIE need of attention; and so on."2 ally need to be raised in relation to the text is
FLETCHER? AND KATHRYN A. It seems to me that in all of this Clark gets whether it in fact makes sense to carve things
TUMA something about Cubism exactly right-hits up in this way-whether, that is, the issues are
Picasso: The Cubist Portraits of Fernande
the trompe l'oeil nail on the head, as it were. quite as separable as Karmel's partitioning
No art ever hung more on its detail.3 Individ- suggests. For the time being, however, and for
Olivier, exh. cat. ually and as a group, Cubist images demand the purpose of accurately presenting the
Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of the viewer's scrupulous attention. Each work study's main lines of argument, it seems
Art; Princeton: Princeton University is little more (and decidedly no less) than an worth adhering fairly closely to its basic struc-
Press, 2003. 196 pp.; 82 color ills., 68 accumulation of specific passages, and, by the ture.
b/w. $45.00 same token, any account that would show us In the first chapter Karmel identifies the

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 BOOK REVIEWS 615

"three key ideas" associated with earlier avant- great deal turns on his claim that empiricism ter for Picasso's early "African" paintings,
garde movements that he considers essential viewed "tactile" and "optical" sensation as rep- such as the Nude with Drapery from the sum-
to an understanding of Cubism. One of these resenting "fundamentally different worlds of mer of 1907. Once more, a comparison with
is the "empiricist" theory of perception; experience rather than two different ways of Krauss's analysis is instructive. She had ar-
Karmel notes that it began to play an impor- perceiving the same world" (p. 21). Phrased gued that the repeated parallel hatchings in
tant role in French painting during the latter in precisely this way, the claim manages to these works were fully ambiguous.10 On the
half of the 19th century, having received what keep the idea of a flat image exclusively de- one hand, they could be seen as a more or
seemed like objective confirmation in the psy- voted to tactility from collapsing in outright less traditional means of modeling, indicating
chophysiological experiments of Hermann contradiction, in that its appeal to "experi- the recession of form into depth; on the
von Helmholtz.6 The second conceptual pre- ence" allows Karmel to draw a connection other hand, they might be understood as
cedent is to be found, Karmel claims, in the with Symbolism that largely covers over the evoking the scarification of African masks,
Symbolists' conviction that "the work of art inconsistencies. Just as the Symbolists had and so read instead as pure surface pattern
should not imitate reality but should offer an sought not the imitation of reality but expe- effectively negating any and all reference to
'equivalent' for experience, expressed in the riential "equivalents," so Picasso, in Karmel's three-dimensionality. In Krauss's view these
language of visual symbols" (p. 2), while the view, needed only to find a set of visual forms were mutually exclusive alternatives, their un-
third "key idea" is the principle of " 'decora- capable of evoking- or serving as equivalents decidability suggesting the "unraveling of
tive' design." Of these, the theory of empiri- for-purely tactile sensations. And this the ... the perceptual plenum, a disintegration
cist perception receives the most extended artist is said to have actually done, initially of it into the unsynthesized possibility of two
treatment in the chapter; as it is also in many through the faceting of forms in his paintings separate and separately marked sensory chan-
ways the most problematic of the three, it from 1908 and 1909, beginning with the Three nels.""11Karmel, by contrast, sees the Nude
deserves special scrutiny. Women:"The human body, in these pictures, with Drapery as a fully achieved synthesis, a
In basic outline, the theory held that per- appears as a monolithic mass with crystalline virtual monument to plenitude, "the hatch
ception depends on two separate sensory contours. The shading is not meant to repro- marks function [ing] simultaneously as decora-
tracks, the optical and the tactile. It insisted duce the appearance of the body under any tive and as sculptural elements" (p. 55).12
that the images imprinted on our retinas are actual lighting conditions, but to give an in- The certainty of analysis in these two exam-
essentially flat (according to John Locke, tensified sense of its three-dimensional form" ples is characteristic of Karmel's account in
each was "a plane variously colored" and thus, (p. 12).* general. Ambivalence has no place in his
in effect, "a painting," p. 3), and that we are One of the problems with Karmel's argu- book. We hear neither of regret or hesitation
able to flesh these images out into three di- ment, at least to my mind, is that this descrip- on Picasso's part nor of the ambiguous, "re-
mensions only as a result of prior experience, tion of the work simply fails to ring true. Only versible" structures that other scholars have
through our memories of navigating space some of the contours in the Three Womenap- seen as integral to the artist's Cubism. Karmel
and actually touching things. For the Impres- pear to me to be "crystalline," and I'm unable makes no mention, for example, of the unde-
sionists, obviously, the theory was pure boon: to experience the three-dimensionality of the cidably convex/concave "cube" that domi-
its assertion of the essential planarity of the figures as "intense," despite Karmel's insistent nates the forehead of Fernande Olivier in all
retinal image seemed to hold out the possi- reminders that when seen in person the of those 1909 portraits from Horta de Ebro.13
bility of that image's direct and relatively easy painting appears much more sculptural than Nor does he acknowledge the way that
transcription onto the two-dimensional sur- it does in reproduction. In order to accept his many of Picasso's still lifes, including his first
face of a canvas. But in the case of Picasso, analysis, one would have to overlook the fu- collage, Still Life with Chair Caning (1912),
and to a lesser extent Braque, reconciling sion of figure and ground, especially in the appear to constantly reorient themselves-
painting with the empiricist model of percep- lower right corner of the canvas, and the way from vertical tableau to horizontal table and
tion would prove to be a substantially more that the central character is joined at the hip back again.14 Karmel largely accepts William
complicated affair. Rosalind Krauss, who to and thigh to the torso of the woman adjacent. Rubin's characterization of early Cubist space
my knowledge was the first scholar to posit a Leo Steinberg has argued, I think rightly, that as analogous to that of a bas-relief, the ele-
connection between Helmholtz's model of these figures should be seen as struggling to ments of the composition unambiguously
vision and the development of Cubism, imag- extricate themselves both from one another projecting forward from an impenetrable
ined that Picasso received the news of depth's and from the plane of the picture, which background plane.'15 To the extent that
inaccessibility to sight with a profound sense otherwise threatens their complete assimila- Karmel departs from this description, it is to
of loss.7 She claimed that in writing "Majolie" tion.9 It is a question, then, not of a height- recast the terms of the analogy, substituting
across the bottom of his painting or later ened sense of three-dimensional form but of the (deeper) space of a theatrical stage for
turning to pictorial signs that might be seen the maintenance of any sense at all. Admit- that of relief carving. This allows him in chap-
as "protolinguistic" in their retreat from illu- tedly, in his discussion of the Three Womenin ter 2 to find precedents for Picasso's and
sionism and even likeness, Picasso was trying the following chapter ("Spaces"), Karmel ac- Braque's early images in, for example, the
to literally inscribe depth (and so also carnal- knowledges "the extraordinarily close integra- "stacked" landscapes of Duccio's Maest&'altar-
ity) in a field from which it had otherwise tion of the figures with one another and with piece.
been evacuated. the surrounding space" (p. 34). But this inte- The projective space of early Cubist paint-
Karmel's understanding of how the empir- gration is seen as creating a decorative har- ings is eventually checked, according to
icist theory of vision relates to Picasso's Cub- mony, a pleasantly "unified pattern of lines." Karmel, in 1908 and 1909, by the imposition
ism is markedly different, however. If Helm- Neither the shallowness of the illusionistic of a two-dimensional, diagonal "lattice" on
holtz and others had posited two distinct space nor the interlocking of forms has any- top of the basic composition. Here, the pri-
perceptual tracks, the visual and the tactile, thing to do with the limitations of the "optical mary examples are (again) Picasso's Three
and if Impressionism had aligned itself exclu- track" as revealed by Helmholtz. Again, in Women and a number of paintings by
sively with the former, Picasso and Braque, marked contrast to Krauss, Karmel imagines Braque.'" At this point, briefly, an element of
according to Karmel, plumped wholly for the Picasso as trying to isolate the tactile and uncertainty is introduced. "The imposition of
latter. In 1908 they set out, he says, "to define doing so successfully. If the painting calls at- geometric form," Karmel says, "can either re-
a purely 'tactile' style, one that would use the tention to its two-dimensionality, this is to be inforce the tactile presence of objects or re-
language of geometry to describe the 'real' understood as a response to the ideal of "dec- duce them to an optical flicker. It may even,
forms of bodies and objects without relying orative design" (Karmel's third "key idea"), for a moment, do both. But the two goals
on the optical effects of incident light." At with the only struggle at issue in the work remain fundamentally opposed" (p. 43).
this point in his argument, it seems to me, the being the artist's effort "to find the right bal- Barely have we registered this moment of
logic becomes a bit obscure, and Karmel ance between sculptural presence and deco- doubt, however, when the "three-dimensional
doesn't do all that he might to make its work- rative flatness" (p. 36). grid" (now squarely aligned with the framing
ings plain. If I've understood correctly, a A comparable claim is made in a later chap- edges of the painting) materializes, resolving

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616 ART BULLETIN SEPTEMBER 2004 VOLUME LXXXVI NUMBER 3

the dilemma. Unlike the more purely deco- Picasso seems to have decided that since mainder, Karmel felt compelled to add that
rative grids found in the turn-of-the-century the structureof the Cubistfigure was now Saussure was simply wrong about language
work of Kolo Moser and Gerhard Munthe, identical with the structure of Cubist and that, in any case, his best ideas were
those of Picasso's and Braque's Cubist paint- space, there was no longer any point in clearly anticipated in the writings of several
ings are seen to be fully three-dimensional; concealing it--or duplicating it. If the mo- 19th-century philologists. The first argument
Karmel describes them as jungle gym-like tif was constructed from planes attached is surely the one that matters, and it should
scaffoldings. We are meant to understand to a three-dimensional armature, the have been sufficient on its own. The fact that
that with the invention of this grid, Picasso viewercould be trusted to understand that Karmel persists with the others indicates ad-
achieved an even more satisfying-because the space around the motif was structured ditional, largely unspoken dissatisfactions
more radical-resolution of the conflict be- in the same fashion. The problem of pic- with the Saussurean model-principally, one
tween the decorative and the sculptural than torial space had been solved.... Hence- suspects, with the fact that it was a model (an
he had with any of his previous works.17 In the forth Picasso advanced by inventing a se- analogy drawn by the art historian, suggesting
Cubist images done after 1910, Karmel says, ries of new waysto represent the figure as parallels between phenomena from different
the individual planes of the composition pile a three-dimensional construction. (p. 91) cultural spheres) rather than something that
up unambiguously one in front of another, could be discussed in the traditional language
the whole stack projecting forward into the There are a couple of things worth noting of influence (that is, of the artist's more
space of the viewer. (The widely held view in this passage, which is in many respects or less conscious appropriation). Beyond
that the works of 1911 and 1912 are engaged typicalof Karmel'soverallapproach. The first Karmel's stated belief that the theories of
with a progressive flattening is, evidently, is the role that Picasso's drawings play. (Sig- language held by Saussure's predecessors
wholly mistaken-based in a failure to per- nificantly,Karmel'sdissertation,out of which have a greater explanatory power in regard to
ceive what are actually clear and decisive the present study grew, took the drawingsas the Cubist sign, he clearly feels that because
cues.) Moreover, in contrast to the paintings its principal subject.19) Throughout the book their work predates Picasso's, it offers more
done prior to 1908, in which the foreground they are used interchangeablywith paintings reliable ground for a properly historical
was necessarily equated with the lower por- to plot the course of Cubism's advance. study.22
tion of the canvas, here "the leading edge of Karmelhas obviouslyspent a lot of time look- Despite his general criticism, Karmel claims
the picture" appears to exist somewhere in ing at these drawings;he has chosen his ex- to have found two aspects of the Saussurean
the vicinity of its center. This deprivileging of amples well and explicates them patiently. model (as articulated by Bois) relevant to a
the bottom in turn makes possible what Still, it is difficult to escape the thought that discussion of Cubism. The first concerns the
Karmel regards as the major spatial innova- the clarityand certitude he claims for Cubism notion that in "primitive" systems, where
tion in Picasso's Cubist paintings done be- are properties of the drawings, not to be there are relatively few signs, each will be
tween 1911 and 1912: the "reorientation of found-or not to the same degree-in Picas- richer and more ambiguous than it would
the grid into a series of vertical bands." In so's more elaborated painted compositions. were the system highly differentiated. The
itself, that move may not seem overly signifi- The second strikingaspect of the passageis second, closely related notion involves the
cant, but it will provide the template, Karmel its adherence to a model of reconciliation sign's dependence on context-the fact that,
argues, for the disposition of the pasted pa- and advance. Problems are first posed, then in language as in Cubism, the same signifier
pers in Cubism's first papiers colles."1 solved, and the artist moves on in search of can be used in different settings to signify
Chapter 3, "Bodies," covers much of the further challenges. The progressive shape of different things. Karmel nonetheless argues,
same chronological ground as the previous Karmel's narrative is of a piece, it seems to as I have already suggested, that both of these
("spatial") chapter and even shares some- me, with his persistent denials of ambiguityin ideas can be found in the work of 19th-cen-
thing of its basic structure. Here again there Picasso's work-and both of these features tury linguists, most notably, Hippolyte Taine
is an opposition to be overcome and an inte- strongly color the account of Cubist "Signs" and Arsene Darmesteter. He describes the
gration achieved. It is a matter this time of offered in chapter 4. pertinence of their work to Cubism as follows:
assimilating the human figure to the increas- Even readers skeptical of Karmel'sdescrip-
ingly complex space(s) of Cubism. According tion of the mechanism driving Cubism may For the psychological school deriving
to Karmel, the problem first arose as a prob- nonetheless find themselveswishing reconcil- from Taine, the speech of children pro-
lem in the fall of 1909, when the two separate iation had played a greater role in this por- vided an example of a primitive language
paths of investigation that Picasso had been tion of the text. The strength of the earlier possessing only a few words but imbuing
following neared their ends. These months chapters lies in their attentive focus on par- each one of them with a broad range of
witnessed the culmination of Picasso's search ticular works and the tacit recognition that potential meaning. So too the geometric
for "sculptural" mass, the literally sculpted the claims of the book are necessarilystaked vocabulary of Cubism might be seen as a
Head of a Woman (Fernande) rendering that on that analysis. Unfortunately, the first fif- primitive visual language in which each
accomplishment concrete. At the same time, teen pages of "Signs"is given over to what form can potentially represent many dif-
though in a different group of images, the becomes a tiresome critique of earlier "semi- ferent objects. These primitive languages
"projective space" that Picasso had been forg- ological" accounts of Cubism. Two essays by are not totally unstructured, however....
ing over the past months reached its greatest Rosalind Kraussfrom the early 1980s receive The basic geometric forms of Cubism cor-
depth to date; Karmel points specifically to the brunt of the attack-though, curiously, respond to verbal metaphors based on re-
the example of Le Bock (Glass of Beer). For the "The Motivation of the Sign," a paper pub- semblance. A rectangular plane looks like
next several years, he says, the artist would be lished in 1992, is barely mentioned.20 Yve- a guitar or a torso; a circle looks like a
preoccupied with finding a way to make Alain Bois's work comes in for similar criti- breast or a head. Of course, metaphor is
sculptural form convincingly inhabit that out- cism, which seems particularlyironic (not to just one of the rhetorical tropes that
ward-advancing space. By, in effect, prying say ungrateful) in that the latter half of Darmesteter identified as crucial to the
the facets of the earlier "crystalline" figures Karmel's chapter reads as a fairly direct ex- formation of new words. Cubism also em-
apart, Picasso opened their forms to the sur- tension, and so also affirmation, of Bois's ploys a range of other signs that function
rounding environment and so achieved some project.21Moreover, because both Bois and like the tropes of synecdoche and meton-
measure of success. But the real solution, as Krausshad drawnparallelswith the linguistics ymy .... in the formation of a complex
Karmel sees it, would come only with the of Ferdinand de Saussure, Saussure is tar- Cubist sign, a basic geometric form (the
emergence of the Cubist "grid" and the re- geted as well. Karmel's chief complaints are qualified) tends to be given a more precise
making of the human anatomy along its lines. with Saussure's claims for the "arbitrariness" meaning by a second sign (the qualifier)
The drawings of the summer and fall of 1912 and purely differentialnature of the linguistic that suggests just one of its features: a
tell the story. Referring to the "void" or blank sign. For fully ten of those first fifteen pages facial plane may be identified [synecdoch-
background in many of them, Karmel offers we are told why the Saussureanmodel is in- ically] by the addition of an eye or a mous-
the following explanation: appropriate to Cubism; in much of the re- tache. (p. 118)

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 BOOK REVIEWS 617

Shortly following these observations, Karmel

takes up again his analysisof particularworks,
detailing the ways that metaphor and synec-
doche can be seen at play within them. This is
Karmel at his best. Placing side by side two
drawingsfrom the summer of 1911, he dem-
onstrates that the basic composition of geo-
metric "qualifieds"is almost identical in the
two-but also how, given different "qualifi-
ers," one became a head while the other was
transformed into a landscape complete with
houses and trees. Even more surprisingis the
series of paired notebook drawingsfrom the
following year. As Karmel points out, simply
by changing the synecdochic "qualifiers,"Pi-
casso transformedthe cafe table of one draw-
ing into a distantview of the port of Marseilles
in which a similar (but now much smaller)
table can be seen. By the same token, a draw-
ing of a guitar shares the same overall com-
position as the image on the next page of the
notebook, wherein a seated woman holds
what looks to be an identical instrument.
Much of the rest of the chapter is devoted
to comparable elaborations of the meta-
phoric and synecdochic elements in Picasso's
(and Braque's) papiers colles and construc-
tions.2" Karmelargues in the case of the 1912
Violin(Fig. 1), for example, that the inscribed
f holes "qualify"the geometric forms on
which they appear, thereby signifying "violin"
in contrast to the compositionallysimilar Gui-
tars produced around the same time. As in
this instance, most of his descriptions are
plausible to the point of noncontention. Yet if
these metaphoric and synecdochic transfor-
mations are to be seen as the extent of inno-
vation in the Cubistsign, one cannot help but
feel a certain sense of disappointment. Gen-
erally we expect that metaphor will reveal
something about one of its terms that we
might not otherwise have noted; being shown
that both a guitar and a violin are vaguely
rectangularfalls, to my mind, somewhat short
of revelation. I suppose it's primarilyfor that
reason-wanting and expecting a bit more
out of the works that we regard as the foun-
tainhead of modernism-that I vastly prefer 1 Pablo Picasso, Violin, 1912. Paris, Musee National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges
the analysisof the Violinoffered us by Rosa- Pompidou (? 2004 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society [ARS], New York;
lind Kraussin her essay "The Motivation of photo: CNAC/MNAM/Dist. Reunion des Musees Nationaux/Art Resource, NY)
the Sign." Karmel, in his discussion of the
papier colle, cites Kraussand indirectly takes
issue with her essay (which he partially mis-
reads) through his assertion that the "in- but also with something on the order of a than for the f holes of a violin) was intended
dented rectangle [at left] is not an arbitrary pun, if even more extreme in its arbitrariness. to underscore the fact that they were not
sign but the stylized version of the actual Here, she showed us, were two materially in- "motivated,"as the semiologists would say, by
contour of a violin" (p. 158). Krauss'sclaim distinguishable signifiers that denoted not resemblance, by any recourse to illusionism.
for the arbitrariness of that element pro- just different but antithetical terms: flat, (Presumably, the fact that the pair are pre-
ceeded from her observation that the two opaque surface and airy, intangible depth. In sented in different "fonts"was intended by
newspaper fragments of the composition ini- general Krauss was interested in those Cubist Picasso to emphasize precisely this same
tially belonged to a single sheet, which Pi- signs (like the right-hand newspaper frag- point.) Thus, the title of Krauss'sessay, "The
casso then cut apart and pasted down, having ment) that while forgoing illusionism-in- Motivationof the Sign,"itself approaches the
turned over one of the pieces in the process. deed, while insisting on their literal flatness- status of a pun, in that she would have us see
She wanted us to see that, in the context of nonetheless managed to impart to the work the motivation or impetus for the artist's re-
the finished work, the piece at left repre- some measure of depth or three-dimension- course to arbitrary,quasi-linguisticsigns in his
sented the face of the violin, whereas the ality. Thus, if she, like Karmel, focused on the desire to both mark the absence of depth
other appeared as continuous with the char- f holes of the composition, it was to see them from the visual trackand yet still inscribe it on
coaled hatchings below it, and so was to be not as signs for "violin" but rather, with their the pictorial field. In her account, then, in
regarded instead as designating the shadowy manifestly different sizes, as signifying contrast to the one offered by Karmel, the
space alongside the instrument. For Krauss, "depth" itself-the turning of the instrument issues of "space,""bodies"and "signs"are in-
therefore, Picasso's papier colle was involved in space. Her characterization of them, too, timately (and compellingly) intertwined.
not simply with metaphor and synecdoche as "arbitrary" signs (again, for depth rather Krauss'sessay is perhaps also usefullyjux-

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618 ART BULLETIN SEPTEMBER 2004 VOLUME LXXXVI NUMBER 3

taposed with the account of papier colle given description of Cubist style, we might say in- so's work, and in the absence of any corrob-
by Natasha Staller in her recent book A Sum of stead that her book operates on the model of orating statements by the artist, the relevance
Destructions:Picasso's Culturesand the Creationof collage. Avowedly disjunctive, with nothing of of Staller's comparisons is impossible to estab-
Cubism.24Krauss felt that everything radical Karmel's interest in tracking particular for- lish. No doubt every reader will feel somewhat
and innovative in the artist's Violin disap- mal (or even thematic) developments, it re- differently about the pertinence of the vari-
peared from view the minute one began to lies heavily on what might be called the sug- ous materials she has assembled. To my mind,
regard the newspaper fragments as if they still gestive juxtaposition. Staller speculates little however, only a few pieces of her "collage"
existed in their initial, untransposed form. In on mechanisms of "influence." Her strategy manage to stick to Picasso's work in any sig-
saying as much, she was taking up a position is, rather, to include copious illustrations of nificant way. (Of these, her discussion of the
in an ongoing debate about the appropriate- archival material, which she hopes the reader polychromed statuettes known as barros,
ness of reading those fragments, and whether will find reminiscent of Picasso's Cubist work. which were manufactured for the tourist
it extended even to those that were pasted Nonetheless, the text abjures all formal and trade in Malaga, is the most compelling-
into the image upside down. If Patricia (for the most part) visual comparison. In the largely because the incorporation of fringe,
Leighten once represented the other pole in section on the "Fetishized Fragment," for ex- rope, and metal wire in the barrosdoes in fact
that debate, her position has now clearly been ample, we are shown a pair of paintings by recall elements of Picasso's Cubist construc-
superseded by that of Staller, whose newspa- Malaguefio artists (one a decapitation of tions.)
per-reading habits are infinitely more expan- Saint Paul, the other depicting a medical au- In many ways, A Sum of Destructionsbelongs
sive. Staller would have us scrutinize even topsy) as well as images of several 19th-cen- to the tradition of "source-hunting" that once
those parts of the paper that never actually tury ex-votos, each representing some part of occupied a major place in Picasso scholar-
made it (upside down or otherwise) into any the human anatomy (a leg, a heart, a set of ship, particularly scholarship concerned with
of the papiers colles: eyes); yet there is not a single work by Picasso. the Demoiselles d'Avignon. It rummages, obvi-
The argument rests solely on the comparison ously, not through the storehouses of earlier
When we go back to the whole of the implicit in the section's opening sentence: art but in the wider field of visual culture.
original newspapers and read texts that "Picasso, the future maker of a Cubist art of And it is perhaps best read, as I've already
are not visible in his art-the rest of the fragments, spent his first ten years in a culture suggested, as a work of visual or cultural stud-
texts from which he cut, or texts and im- that was fascinated, almost obsessed, with ies, one meticulously researched and lavishly
ages that immediately adjoin what he in- body parts-parts often believed to be illustrated. If measured against the standards
cluded, or texts and images that are on the charged with higher meaning" (p. 19). Surely of art history (or the criteria articulated by
reverse of what he included-we discover I'm not the only one who feels that if Staller Clark), it seems to fall not so much short as
more private jokes, and sometimes, clues had attempted a comparison with a particular wide of the mark. Reading it, I was reminded
to his private passions. (p. 228) painting by Picasso, it would have been made of Leo Steinberg's critique of the source-
plain to all that Cubist fragmentation was of hunting studies of old:
Although a relatively small fraction of her an altogether different sort. As Karmel shows
over-400-page text is devoted to the results of us, its primary function was to assimilate fig- To my eye, the comparisons that give rise
this particular archival foray, I am inclined to ure and ground; I cannot think of a single to such claims for influence or inspiration
see it as emblematic of Staller's project as a instance where limbs, for example, are are rarely close enough to convince. But
whole. The book is focused far less on Picas- cleaved whole in a manner suggestive of dis- they do have a sort of negative function:
so's art (and so, of course, on the details of memberment.26 instead of focusing vision, they tend to
specific works) than it is on the social, politi- Much the same problem recurs later in the distract it. The picture drops into the
cal, and quotidian contexts out of which that book, when Staller attempts to draw an anal- pond of art history: you can watch swelling
art emerged. A Sum of Destructions is perhaps ogy between Picasso's Cubism and the early circles about the impact, but something
best characterized, then, as a work of visual or cinema of Georges Mlibs. Clearly aware of has passed out of sight.27
cultural studies, concentrating on the various the objections her argument is likely to raise,
"cultures" of Picasso's youth, principally those she prefaces the section with a sort of dis- In Picasso: Style and Meaning, Elizabeth
of Malaga, La Corufia, and Barcelona. claimer: Cowling manages somewhat more effectively
Staller has assembled a vast range of mate- to discuss Picasso's biography, his various
rial-on everything from holy relics, chil- The relationship between the cinema of "sources," and the work's relation to contem-
dren's games, and the early cinema of Georges Melias and the Cubism of Pi- porary events, all while keeping an eye
Georges M61ies to a variety of secret codes casso is not one of visual resemblance. trained on the works of art themselves. Ad-
and invented languages (Esperanto, Bolak, Cubist works do not look like stills from mittedly, hers is a very different sort of book:
and Volapfik)-all of it having some pur- Meli&s's films nor do they share any ob- a monograph on the artist that is intended
chase, she contends, on Picasso's Cubist work. vious stylistic traits with any other genres primarily for a general audience. If her vol-
The structure of the book is, in Staller's as- of popular culture. Yet ... many of Cub- ume contributes relatively little to the current
sessment, "somewhat Cubist in nature," a style ism's most radical features-such as the state of Picasso scholarship, it nonetheless
she later describes as aggressive, disjunctive, explicit and self-conscious dialogue be- summarizes the vast body of existing work in
and explicitly unharmonized.25 While inter- tween art and reality, the comic frag- a cogent and easily readable fashion. It has a
esting for what it reveals about the structural mentation of body parts, the use of con- potential drawback in its length; only the
principles of her text (a point to which we'll flicting multiple perspectives, and the most diligent of students will read its 704
soon return), that brief description is also insertion of letters, numbers, advertising pages cover to cover.
striking for the image of Cubism it presents. It copy, and real prosaic objects into artis- Cowling is clearly well versed in the subject,
could hardly be more different from the pic- tic contexts-all had previously occurred and her adjudication of the various contro-
ture drawn by Karmel; he gave us a Picasso in their most literal form, or had occurred versies dividing the field is measured and dis-
constantly striving to attain balance and inte- not in high art but only in the popular passionate.28 Having been asked, quite unrea-
gration in his work. Significantly, Karmel culture pervasive at that time. Picasso sonably, to provide a narrative account of the
never ventured any overarching description took the tricks and effects also found in entirety of Picasso's long, heterogeneous ca-
of the artist's Cubist style. The fact that Staller three-minute films shown in street fairs reer, she made the reasonable-not to say
does-and, moreover, as the point of depar- or the basements of billiard parlors and inspired-decision to make heterogeneity it-
ture for her study, rather than as one of its transformed them into the instruments self the basis for her story. Hers is a narrative,
conclusions-already sets her approach far of high art. (p. 137) then, about artistic change, driven by Picas-
apart from Karmel's and further still, of so's contempt for what he came to regard as
course, from T. J. Clark's. The difficulty, here as elsewhere, is that with- the straitjacket of stylistic consistency.
Putting aside, at least temporarily, Staller's out any compelling visual similarity to Picas- I think it is safe to say that Picasso: Style and

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 BOOK REVIEWS 619

Meaning is the best single book on the full sions, in that they encourage the viewer's cir- Woman,Weiss argues not only that the torsion
span of Picasso's career-and that judgment cumambulation of the work. Extrapolated of the neck encourages our own movement
would likely remain the same even if the com- into the configuration of the head and face, through space but also that the individual
petition were stronger than it is. Clearly writ- the angled planes of the neck transform the planes of the sculpture loosely align them-
ten, richly illustrated, and comprehensive to whole into "a series of precincts and profiles selves with the "collection of flat images" that
an unprecedented degree, it provides a bal- that disrupt a coherent hierarchy of vantage constitutes our perception of the work. For
anced, intelligent overview of the field. points, thereby preventing any single view Weiss, then, the sculpture is to be experi-
Nearly the opposite tack was followed by from being fully determined or ideal" (p. 21). enced as a dispersion of aspects, and he shows
the authors of Picasso: The Cubist Portraits of We can get some sense of what is at stake in how the basic shape and sense of that expe-
Fernande Olivier. Rather than taking on the this description of the Head by comparing it rience is repeated both in Picasso's photo-
entirety of the artist's oeuvre, or even the with the very different account offered by graphs (including the one intriguing and
fraction of it produced between 1908 and Karmel. Both Weiss and Karmel take excep- clearly intentional double exposure he made)
1914, they deliberately limited their focus to a tion with the prevailing view of the work as a and the sheer multiplicity of the drawn and
few, select works. In that sense their book, largely failed attempt on Picasso's part to dis- painted Fernandes:
which served as catalogue to the well-received solve sculptural form. The blame for this mis-
exhibition of the same title, is quite modest in reading is to be placed, Karmel says, on the The Fernande series is ... almost a neces-
its ambition.29 It is also, for that very reason, bronze versions of the sculpture produced by sary construction: successive versions of a
perhaps the most successful and intriguing of Vollard and Berggruen. Any perceived disso- single portrait (achieved over the course
the four books presently under review. lution of solid mass is simply the product of of multiple sittings) are now peeled into a
The catalogue contains three interrelated bronze's reflectivity, which would not have succession of separate, often nearly iden-
essays, including one by Valerie Fletcher that been a factor in the clay original, as indeed it tical canvases. The result is a "portrait"
examines the two existing plaster casts of Pi- is not, he says, in the two surviving plaster practice that forfeits its grounding in like-
casso's 1909 sculpted Head of a Woman, as well casts. Karmel argues that far from being an ness through observation but preserves
as the separate bronze editions made by Am- essay in dissolution, the Head of a Womanwas the procedural connotations of persis-
brose Vollard and Heinz Berggruen; it was intended to emphasize its three-dimensional tence and multiplicity-and perhaps, by
the National Gallery's purchase of a bronze presence, and it was likely made as an aid for extension, the province of doubt. (p. 40)
from the first (Vollard) edition that occa- Picasso's larger, painterly project-namely, to
sioned the organization of the show. Fletch- find a set of visual equivalents for tactile per- It is this doubt, and the melancholy of the
er's technical study is preceded by two very ception, without regard to the effects of inci- Fernande series as described by Weiss, that
fine essays, the first written by Jeffrey Weiss, dent light. become the main focus of Kathryn Tuma's
curator of the exhibition, and the second by For Weiss, by contrast, the problem with essay, "La peau de chagrin." As her point of
Kathryn Tuma. the prevailing view of the Head is simply that departure, she uses two quotations, each em-
Weiss makes it known from the outset that it holds the work to be less than successful. ploying the language of dissection-a peeling
he is not interested (as was Karmel) in chart- He attributes the low evaluation to the fact back of the skin-in order to reveal some-
ing patterns of formal development; he as- that the sculpture is most often seen only in thing fundamental about Picasso's Cubism.
serts, in fact, that such patterns "are often photographic reproduction, especially via a One of the quotations is drawn from Guil-
difficult or even impossible to discern in the single image that shows it in a limiting three- laume Apollinaire's Les peintres cubistes(1913),
Fernande portraits" (p. 6). Instead, he says, quarter view. Thus, whereas Karmel explicitly in which Picasso is said to study an object the
he wants to "consider other, less conventional denied any relation between Picasso's piece way "a surgeon dissects a cadaver." The other
criteria of meaning and method," in which and the sculptural tradition of Auguste Rodin comes from Clement Greenberg's 1949 essay
even the artist's redundancies and hesitations and Medardo Rosso, Weiss argues that the "On the Role of Nature in Modernist Paint-
might register as significant. The rationale for Head can only be understood in relation to ing." Although Cubism had set out, Green-
this approach evidently owes much to several that work. He draws heavily on Rainer Maria berg claimed, with clearly "sculptural" inten-
photographs from the summer of 1909 that Rilke's essays on Rodin (published in 1903 tions, it ended up with a "radical denial of all
were taken by Picasso himself. (Significantly, and 1907) to illuminate the similarities. experience not literally accessible to the
these photographs are treated, in the cata- Chief among Rilke's observations was the eye."'3 In the passage cited by Tuma, he adds:
logue as in the exhibition, as original works function in Rodin's art of the plane (plan in
by Picasso, on an equal footing with the draw- French); he saw it as the work's primary The world was stripped of its surface, of its
ings, paintings, and sculptures in the show.) "unit" as well as its principal means for the skin, and the skin was spread flat on the
The photographs document different staged "acquisition and appropriation of light" and flatness of the picture plane. Pictorial art
arrangements of the Fernande portraits in space. Significantly, Rilke also noted that Paul reduced itself entirely to what was visually
the artist's studio; because those arrange- Cezanne used the very same word-plan-in verifiable, and Western painting had fi-
ments are not chronological, Weiss concludes reference to his own, painterly technique. nally to give up its five hundred years'
that neither they nor the photographs of Mentioning Picasso's close scrutiny of C&- effort to rival sculpture in the evocation of
them were meant to track progress so much zanne, Weiss adds that "the language of the the tactile.
as to "compare permutations of a single mo- plane-in its mutual relevance to both C&-
tif" (p. 10). zanne and Rodin-brings the character of After noting the nearly universal agree-
One of the more prominent "motifs" in the form in Rilke's Rodin closer to the intrinsic ment that Cubism issued from a study of Ce-
Fernande series is the pronounced torsion of nature of early Cubism, including the dy- zanne-and then Picasso's comment that
the figure's neck, made especially striking by namic of painting-sculpture" (p. 23). Cezanne's anxiety was the artist's real lesson
the broad planes of its form and the gaping At this point, with the claims of Karmel and for posterity-Tuma proceeds to weave to-
hollow at its center. Weiss would have us rec- Krauss still fresh in my memory, I fully ex- gether a number of observations and com-
ognize the motif and the accompanying pected Weiss to invoke Helmholtz's theories mentaries involving the figure of an Icorch&.
downward tilt of the head as having a deep of perception. He appeals instead to Henri She notes the resemblance of many of the
connection to the long-standing tradition of Focillon, though the effect is much the same. Fernande paintings to images of anatomical
iconographic and allegorical representations As Weiss reveals, Focillon described "sculp- dissection and cites John Richardson's specu-
of melancholy, which, he says, gives the im- tural experience in. .. inherited terms, as a lation that Picasso's 1908 painting The Dryad
ages their "undeniable affective power" (p. 'collection of flat images, whose sequence or was explicitly modeled on one such drawing
15). In the case of the sculpted Head of a superposition elicits the concept of the solid by Andreas Vesalius. At length she explores
Woman, the torsion of the neck and its facet- only because the exigency already lies within Cezanne's various depictions of the &corchthe
ing are further taken to allegorize the process ourselves' " (p. 36). Regarding the particular owned and the coincidence of those depic-
of apprehending an object in three dimen- experience offered by Picasso's Head of a tions with his renewed interest, during the

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620 ART BULLETIN SEPTEMBER 2004 VOLUME LXXXVI NUMBER 3

1890s, in sculpture generally. All of this has Rosenblum's Cubism and Twentieth-CenturyArt, first Laboratory:The Role of His Drawingsin the Devel-
the effect of casting a rather darker shadow published in 1959, has recently been reissued (New opment of Cubism, 1910-1914," Ph.D. diss., Insti-
York: Harry N. Abrams, 2001). tute of Fine Arts, New York University, 1993.
on Apollinaire's "surgical" analogy. What
5. The lone dissenting opinion comes from Eliz- 20. Karmel aims instead at Krauss's "Re-Present-
Apollinaire's metaphor occludes, Tuma
abeth Cowling, who describes the collaboration be- ing Picasso," Art in America 68, no. 10 (1980); and
writes, tween Picasso and Braque as a "true partnership" "In the Name of Picasso," October,no. 16 (spring
(p. 201). However, that evaluation is somewhat neu- 1981). Karmel mentions her 1992 essay "The Moti-
is the extent to which Picasso's interest in tralized by the fact that Cowling's book is a mono- vation of the Sign" (see n. 7) only in a much later
the kcorchhrevolves [not simply] around graph on Picasso, with the result that Braque still footnote: pp. 218-19 n. 193.
the problem of human anatomy-the pos- only appears as a relatively minor character within 21. Yve-Alain Bois, "The Semiology of Cubism," in
its narrative.
sibility of reducing it, for instance, to a Zelevansky and Rubin (as in n. 7), 169-208. It
6. Actually-unfortunately-Karmel attributes the should be noted, however, that in taking up Bois's
concatenation of pulley- and jointlike ele-
experiments to Heinrich Helmholtz and continues project the way he has, Karmel effectively collapses
ments-[but also] around the intense af- to misidentify "the great psychophysiologist" all of the distinctions between Picasso and Braque
fective registers that the figure so potently throughout the chapter. that Bois had carefully drawn.
evokes. Far from surgical, far from the dry 7. Rosalind Krauss, "The Motivation of the Sign," 22. Karmel writes (p. 111), "There is also the
intellectualism often attributed to Picas- in Picasso and Braque: A Symposium, ed. Lynn Zele- chronological problem: even the proponents of a
so's Cubist devices, what is happening to vansky and William Rubin (New York: Museum of Saussurean interpretation of Cubism do not argue
the human figure as it is "stripped down" Modern Art, 1992), 261-86, at 283 n. 1. that Picasso could literally have been influenced by
to its component parts does not result in a 8. Later on the same page Karmel adds, "In the his ideas. Implicitly or explicitly, they fall back on
cold abstraction but in something more language of nineteenth-century empiricism, facet- Jean Laude's argument that both Cubism and Saus-
ing is a device for communicating 'tactile values'-- surean linguistics are examples of the tendency,
like an anguished expression of exposure for representing the actual three-dimensional forms after the turn of the twentieth century, to think 'not
and loss. of things rather than the optical sensations pro- about things but about the relationships among
duced by them." them."' For a defense of the "model" and its place
It is as if, during the course of the dissection, 9. We will leave aside for the moment the whole within art history, see Yve-Alain Bois, Painting as
the "surgeon" discovered, much to his dis- question of the sex of the three "women"-and Model (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990), esp. the
what Steinberg has characterized as their apparent introduction and the title essay (245-57).
may, that the body was only skin, or could
struggle for gender (as well as formal) differentia- 23. Although in many ways incidental to the main
only be known as such. This is la peau de tion. See Leo Steinberg, "Resisting Cezanne," Art in subject of the book-which, consistent with the ti-
chagrin of the essay's title: the hide, regretta- America 66 (Nov.-Dec. 1978): 114-33. tle, I take to be Picasso's Cubism-one of Karmel's
bly, hiding nothing. 10. Krauss (as in n. 7), 268-69. more interesting "findings" concerns Braque's pa-
Needless to say, the Picasso who emerges 11. Ibid., 269. piers collhs. Using his understanding of the process
from the essays by Tuma and Weiss is a much 12. Emphasis added. by which these works were made (both artists pro-
different character from the one(s) pre- 13. On the significance of the reversible cube, see ducing series in which the "qualifiers" were progres-
sented in any of the other books here under Clark (as in n. 1), 197ff. sively modified, thus giving the "qualifieds" new
review. (He is in fact much closer to the representational values), Karmel argues that
14. Rosalind Krauss was the first to note the am-
Braque's Fruit Dish and Glass, traditionally thought
Picasso of Krauss's "The Motivation of the bivalent orientation of Still Life with Chair Caning, in to be the first of the pasted-paper works, was more
her review essay "The Cubist Epoch," Artforum9, no.
Sign"--or the artist Tim Clark sees struggling probably the third in the series.
to make sense of his Cubist "discoveries.") 6 (Feb. 1971): 33. Subsequently, Christine Poggi
24. See Patricia Leighten, Re-orderingthe Universe:
The difference in this regard between The found additional examples of the phenomenon,
Picasso and Anarchism, 1897-1914 (Princeton:
which she discusses in the chapter "Frames of Ref-
CubistPortraits ofFernande Olivierand Karmel's Princeton University Press, 1989).
erence: Table and Tableau in Picasso's Collages and
Picasso and the Invention of Cubism is particu- Constructions," in her book In Defiance of Painting: 25. This description comes in her discussion of
Les demoisellesd Avignon, which Staller views (contro-
larly striking. The latter will clearly be the Cubism, Futurism and the Invention of Collage (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 58-89. versially) as "the first Cubist painting because of its
preferred text for those who like their mod-
ernism confident and optimistic. Weiss, 15. For an effective critique of Rubin's bas-relief aggressive, unprecedented disjunctiveness, its ex-
analogy, see Steinberg (as in n. 9), 119-21. Stein- plicitly unharmonized conglomeratic unity, its ex-
Tuma, and Fletcher present a decidedly more plicit inversions and metamorphoses which evince
anxious image-but one that many may find, berg looks principally to Picasso's Horta landscapes the conceptual whole of the Cubist project" (p. 80).
from 1909, which, tellingly, Karmel passes over in
for precisely that reason, to be the more com- near silence. 26. Flaying, on the other hand, is a separate issue,
pelling. As to which is the "correct" view: let 16. The recourse to Braque's work is crucial here, which will be discussed below.
us at least agree that the answer is to be found in that it allows Karmel to use that artist's retrospec- 27. Leo Steinberg, "The Philosophical Brothel,"
only in the details. tive statements-his expressed desire to "touch October,no. 44 (spring 1988): 72-73.
things, and not just to see them"-to stand for the 28. A footnote to her discussion of Picasso's pa-
intentions of Picasso as well. piers colles provides a good case in point: "There
LISA FLORMAN is associate professorin the
17. Interestingly, Clement Greenberg, whose has been heated debate about the meaning of news-
History of Art Department at Ohio State work Karmel caricatures and then dismisses early in print in Picasso's papiers collis, and specifically about
University [100 Hayes Hall, 108 North Oval the book, had also seen Cubism as attempting to whether one can infer Picasso's politics from the
Mall, Columbus, Ohio 43210]. negotiate between the "decorative" and the "sculp- sections referring to, e.g., the Balkan War. (Much of
tural." He located the triumphant moment when the newspaper is literally illegible in the papiers colls
their opposition was overcome in the advent of themselves, e.g. in Glass and Bottle of Suze ..., be-
papier coll?-thus a full two years later than cause of the way Picasso cut out and positioned the
Notes Karmel. For Greenberg, however, the sculptural/ fragments.) Opposed points of view are expressed
1. T. J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a decorative dialectic was fully negative (or Ador- in Leighten 1989 and Krauss 1998, 25-85. See also
History of Modernism (New Haven: Yale University nian) in its earlier manifestations, whereas for the debate between Leighten, Steinberg, Rosen-
Press, 1999), 180. Karmel it seems to maintain an essentially Hegelian blum and Rubin in P & B: Symposium, 77-79, and
2. Ibid., 183. shape throughout. On these matters, see Green- David Cottington, 'Cubism, Aestheticism, Modern-
3. That is, with the possible exception of Paul berg's "Collage," in Art and Culture (Boston: Beacon ism,' in ibid., 58-71. Krauss's notion of the newspa-
Klee's. Press, 1961), 70-83, as well as my own article on per fragments being intended to suggest the 'buzz'
4. In addition to the books covered in this review, that essay, Lisa Florman, "The Flattening of 'Col- of different voices, opinions, debates, etc. is to my
the list includes David Cottington's Cubism in the lage,'" October,no. 102 (fall 2003): 59-86. mind the most convincing."
Shadow of War: The Avant-Garde and Politics in Paris, 18. Karmel will also go on to speculate that 29. The exhibition was organized by the National
1905-1914 (New Haven: Yale University Press, Braque's decision to paste strips of wallpaper into Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and ran there
1998); Neil Cox, Cubism (London: Phaidon Press, his work-and thus his invention of papier collh- from October 1, 2003, untilJanuary 18, 2004. Sub-
2000), part of the Art and Ideas collection; and was motivated by the simple recognition that wall- sequently, it traveled to the Nasher Sculpture Cen-
Patricia Leighten and Mark Antliff's text for the paper is generally hung in similarly proportioned ter in Dallas, where the works were on view from
World of Art series, Cubism and Culture (New York: vertical strips. mid-February to early March 2004.
Thames and Hudson, 2001). Moreover, Robert 19. Pepe Karmel (Joseph Low Karmel), "Picasso's 30. Greenberg (as in n. 17), 172.

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