The Picasso Papers

What Columbia art historian Krauss (The Optical Unconscious) argues here will be obscure to most, but not to the small intellectual group--of which she is one--that rabidly guards the gates of art criticism. Indeed, Krauss's use of ""we"" in her first line (""We smiled wryly at Warhol's remark... accepted it as a comment on our modernity, which is to say our postmodernity"") may be off-putting. Krauss continues her reading of art and culture through the selective lenses of deconstruction, psychoanalysis and new historicism. Here, she contends that Picasso's work in ""pastiche"" (obvious borrowing from previous artworks) is ""a blatant betrayal"" of the ""make it new"" ethos of most modernists, but is all the more ""paradigmatically"" modern for its playful thefts. She finds a curious interpenetration of ""pure"" and recycled forms (""the earliest visual system of freely circulating signs"") in Picasso's cubism of 1912-1916. This system culminates in a turn toward full-blown pastiche and stiff, almost photographic facial portraiture in 1916-1924, which Krauss sees as a ""reaction formation"" against cubism, and thus a convoluted recreation of it: ""Pastiche is not necessarily the destiny of modernism, but it is its guilty conscience."" This work reads more like an extended, sometimes aggressively jargony footnote than a work of traditional scholarship, and Krauss's poststructuralist style and self-referential method are beginning to sound a tad old-fashioned. 76 b&w illustrations. (Feb.)