Obsessive Compulsive Theorizing

...He is "a Midas whose every touch is golden...

...The works displayed included both the Cubism he had made familiar before World War I and something new—neoclassical drawing...

...She not only executes it late and perfunctorily, but keeps her hands clean by citing Norman Mailer and critic John Berger to paint a picaresque Picasso who is a "short, girlish adolescent" plagued by "desperate poverty," an interloper from the feudal peasantry of Spain into "the center of European industrialized culture...

...It is one thing to sever theory or esthetic criticism from biography...

...It is difficult to see how a man who (with Joyce) embodies modernism might be threatened by the marginal, if interesting, Picabia...

...For Adorno, Schönberg's invention of serial composition—characterized by its arbitrariness—was progress...

...Stravinsky, who mined earlier composers and popular musical forms, was guilty of artistic backsliding...

...The reaction...

...A gee-whiz reaction, though, is not all one expects a substantial work of scholarly criticism to provide...

...How did the scintillating maker of structuralist collages come to spend years perpetrating such fraud...

...Any outrage over the oddities of perspective committed in the name of Cubism had by this time been exhausted, at least among habitués of the Rosenberg gallery...

...Using past art as a reference point, however, she considers an "esthetic fake...

...Saussure might have approved...

...Nor has he, 79 years later, been let off the hook...

...Reviewed by Richard Lamb An old chestnut has it that the talented borrow and geniuses steal...

...Krauss admires Picasso's Cubist collages...

...Their use of bits of newspaper or everyday litter to represent objects, she notes approvingly, exemplifies the structuralist linguistic theories of Ferdinand de Saussure...

...We must turn to someone like Andrew Graham-Dixon, an old school critic for the London Independent, for a description: "He was extremely rich, for one thing, the son of a Cuban-born Spanish aristocrat, and irritated most of his contemporaries in Dadaist and Surrealist circles by leading a dual existence—artistic anarchist and big-spending socialite rolled into one...

...He held that language is— yes—utterly arbitrary, that there is no intrinsic link between a word, or "signifier," and its meaning...

...As for a reader of this lengthy shaggy-dog essay, I'm not so sure...

...The observation could be aptly applied to Pablo Picasso, a notorious artistic kleptomaniac...

...Well, apparently Picasso was driven to obsessive neoclassicism by his contemporary Francis Picabia, one of whose most famous works is a picture of a spark plug entitled Portrait of an American Girl (1915...

...He gradually shifted to a consistent, unmodulated line, and by the time he produced his Portrait of André Derain in 1919 had moved on to a simplified, almost caricatural style...

...Yet penetrating as she can be, Krauss is also rébarbative...

...He "noticed Picabia's pastiche of his new stylistic departure," says Krauss, "noticed it and confirmed it with his own version of the same pastiche, producing thereby a strange derivative of a derivative, in the form of a pastiche of himself...

...In 1919, at the Paul Rosenberg Gallery in Paris, Picasso put on a one-man show, his first since 1905...

...Picasso, we are further told, saw in Picabia's work a "deskilling," with technique counting for less and less...

...Ultimately horrified at what he had helped bring about, he retreated into the world of the Beaux-Arts: "Picasso's supposed classicism, so clean, so pure, so effortlessly productive, is the underside of mechanization taking command...

...Such a man might be more vulnerable than the Picasso of modernist fable...

...The same, Krauss declares, is true of the neoclassical Picasso...

...A draughtsman of great skill and polish, in these pieces Picasso began to hark back to 19th-century masters like Ingres...

...Yet Krauss never tells us much about this Picabia fellow who pushed him to display symptoms of what psychiatrists would consider Obsessive Compulsive Disorder...

...He was a pasticheur...

...Picabia collected fast cars (including several Hispano-Suizas and a 40hp Rolls-Royce) and women with an almost absurd, Don Juan-like profligacy...

...And Columbia University art historian Rosalind Krauss—without ever referring to the reputedly outdated term "genius"—does...

...Krauss contends that a 1917 Picabia collage incorporating a photograph was meant as a jibe at Picasso's recent drawings...

...Krauss' argument is an innovative rethinking of some well-chewed art historical fodder...

...The Picasso of the collages is celebrated by Krauss as "the great prestidigitator, the wizard who turns the debris around him—newspaper, withered leaves, bicycle parts—to creative account...

...In the process, she subjects the mid-career Picasso to interpretations by turns structuralist and Freudian, decorates her analysis with fanciful description, then illuminates it with meager yet strikingly exact flashes of the artist's life...

...Finishing The Picasso Papers, one may marvel at the number of dog-eared pages marking passages where Krauss has tossed off some especially tantalizing insight...

...The impression left by the book is of a veritable catalogue of academic vanities—as if Krauss wanted her argument to be admired more for its luxuriant excesses, its fugue-like variations on some of the titanic theories of our century, than for an attribute as retrograde as meaning...

...To make her case, Krauss must create "a character far more troubled than the usual legend," and this is a biographical task...

...But Krauss employs the tenets of psychology to interpret Picasso's work, and severing psychology from biography inevitably causes serious problems...

...Perhaps most unfortunate is her explicit hostility to biographical criticism, for this is exactly what is needed here to give some dimension to her twist on the anxiety-of-influence argument...

...But instead of, say, washing his hands a lot in an effort to repress his sexuality, he continued to produce neoclassical drawings in unconscious protest against Picabia's insult...

...Such works as Portrait of Max Jacob (1915) are executed with painstaking realism...

...Shock...

...In other words—strictly Freudian ones this time—Picasso developed a reaction formation...

...But the drawings were another matter...

...Outrage...

...To Krauss, the drawings represent "Picasso as counterfeiter, his act a blatant betrayal of the modernist project...

...Equally painful to him was the fact that such a decline was already implicit in Cubism, and would only continue with the popularity of both abstraction and photography, since neither demand the virtuosity of the Old Masters...

...Krauss ackowledges that the trouble lies with the Picasso of myth, an artist of "almost God-like capacities...

...Her judgment is based on a model used by Frankfurt School philosopher and music critic Theodor Adomo to differentiate the two giants of 20th-century music, Arnold Schönberg and Igor Stravinsky...