CUBIST COLLAGE !

Pablo Picasso, La Vie, 1903 ! Paul Gaugin, DO Venons Nous, 1897!

Edvard Munch, Dance of Life, 1899-1900!

Pablo Picasso, La Vie, 1903 !

Pablo Picasso, Death of Casagemas, 1901! But once a real person could be placed as the model for the standing male gurethe earlier interpretations of La Vie as an allegory of maturation and development could be put aside for a more local and specic reading. (29)!

Pablo Picasso, La Vie, 1903 !

Pablo Picasso, Death of Casagemas, 1901! The problem with this reading is not that the identication is wrong, but that its ultimate aesthetic relevance is yet to be proven or evenargued (29)!

Pablo Picasso, Seated Bather, 1930!

Pablo Picasso, Bather with Beach Ball, 1932!

As difcult as if someone rst pointed to a Hals portrait of a Dutch militia ofcer and then to his rendering of the Malle Babbe and maintained they were products of different styles. But Rubin was insisting on this differenceeach model with a different name: Olga Picasso; Marie-Therese Walter. (24) !

The revision in the theory of representation that is current underway, in its overturning of those older beliefs [in connotation and multiplicity of meaning, not just denotation or naming], is all the more striking. The revision involves a return to a notion of pictorial representation as constituted by signs with referents but no sense: to the limiting of the aesthetic sign to extension, to the dependent condition of the classically conceived proper name. (28) !

Jan van Eyck, Arnolni Wedding, 1434!

It is as if though the shifting, changing sands of visual polysemy, of multiple meanings and regroupings, have made us intolerably nervous, so that we wish to nd the bedrock of sense. We wish to achieve a type of signication beyond which there can be no further reading or interpretationAnd where more absolutely and appropriately thanpositive identication. (28) !

Pablo Picasso, ! Portrait of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, 1910!

Pablo Picasso, Still Life with Chair Caning, 1912!

Pablo Picasso, The Scallop Shell, 1912 !

Pablo Picasso, Still Life with Chair Caning, 1912!

Pablo Picasso, The Scallop Shell, 1912 !

Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) !

SIGN!

SIGNIFIER ! s !

SIGNIFIED ! S !

Tree

The signier is a material constituent (written trace, phonic element) and the signied, an immaterial idea or concept. (33) !

Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) !

SIGN!

SIGNIFIER ! s !

SIGNIFIED ! S !

Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) !

SIGN!

SIGNIFIER ! s !

SIGNIFIED ! S !

Pablo Picasso, The Scallop Shell (Notre avenir est dans lair), 1912 !

Pablo Picasso, The Scallop Shell (Notre avenir est dans lair), 1912 !

PAMPHLET!

Pablo Picasso, The Scallop Shell (Notre avenir est dans lair), 1912 !

FRENCH NATIONALISM !

Pablo Picasso, The Scallop Shell (Notre avenir est dans lair), 1912 !

Picasso as Frenchman !

Pablo Picasso, Violin, 1912 !

violin !

Pablo Picasso, Violin, 1912 !

foreshortening!

Pablo Picasso, Violin, 1912 !

The structural condition of absence is essential to the operation of the sign within Picassos collagePicasso composes the sign, not of violin, but of foreshortening! And because the inscription of the fs takes place within the collage assembly and thus on the most rigidly attened and frontalized of planes, depth is thus written on the very place from which it is - within the presence of the collage - most absent. It is this experience of inscription that guarantees these forms the status of signs. (33)!

Pablo Picasso, Violin, 1912 !

What Picasso does with these fs to compose a sign of space as the condition of physical rotation, he does with the application of newsprint to construct the sign of space as penetrable or transparent. It is the perceptual disintegration of the ne-type of the printed page into a sign for the broken color with which paintings (from Rembrandt to Seurat) represent atmosphere, that Picasso continually exploits. (33)!

Pablo Picasso, Violin, 1912 ! In doing so, he inscribes transparency on the very element of the collages fabric that is most reied and opaque: its planes of newspaper. (33) !

Pablo Picasso, Compote Dish with Fruit, Violin, and Glass, 1912 ! the diacritical nature of the sign establishes it as a term whose meaning is never an absolute, but rather a choice from a set of possibilities, with meaning determined by the very terms not chosen. (35)!

Does this trafc light make sense? !

Pablo Picasso, Compote Dish with Fruit, Violin, and Glass, 1912 ! the diacritical nature of the sign establishes it as a term whose meaning is never an absolute, but rather a choice from a set of possibilities, with meaning determined by the very terms not chosen. (35)!

Pablo Picasso, Compote Dish with Fruit, Violin, and Glass, 1912 ! the diacritical nature of the sign establishes it as a term whose meaning is never an absolute, but rather a choice from a set of possibilities, with meaning determined by the very terms not chosen. (35)!

atmosphere/edge !

Pablo Picasso, Compote Dish with Fruit, Violin, and Glass, 1912 ! the diacritical nature of the sign establishes it as a term whose meaning is never an absolute, but rather a choice from a set of possibilities, with meaning determined by the very terms not chosen. (35)!

open/closed form !

Pablo Picasso, Compote Dish with Fruit, Violin, and Glass, 1912 ! In the great, complex cubist collages, each element is fully diacritical (37)! ! Atmosphere / Edge! ! Line / Color ! ! Closure / Openness! ! Plane / Recession!

Pablo Picasso, Compote Dish with Fruit, Violin, and Glass, 1912 !

The collage element performs the occultation [hiding] of one eld in order to introject the gure of a new eld, but to introject it as gure a surface that is the image of eradicated [demolished] surface. It is this eradication of the original surface and the reconstitution of it through the gure of its own absence that is the master term of the entire condition of collage as a system of signiers. (37)!

gure/ground !

The collage element performs the occultation [hiding] of one eld in order to introject the gure of a new eld, but to introject it as gure a surface that is the image of eradicated [demolished] surface. It is this eradication of the original surface and the reconstitution of it through the gure of its own absence that is the master term of the entire condition of collage as a system of signiers. (37)!

Pablo Picasso, Still Life with Chair Caning, 1912 !