The Picasso Papers

Pablo Picasso turned the ephemera of everyday life into pioneering cubist collage, and reinvented the paintings of old masters for the 20th century. Does this make him an artistic genius? Or was he simply an opportunist, a maverick who mercilessly raided the styles of others? This book presents a view of arguably the greatest artist of the century, by one of the foremost theorists of modern art. Rosalind E. Krauss suggests that if these questions are still necessary it is because modernism itself is a concept in which counterfeit and genuine are not opposites but, instead, two sides of the same condition. Revealing Picasso's collage as a combination of many different elements and ideas, she argues that no single component was thought of as being "authentic" or sanctioned by its author. Picasso's pastiche of other artists, however, is brilliantly brought into focus as an almost hidden element of cubism, rewritten in the bright, clean style of neoclassicism.