The Picasso Papers

Was Picasso a modern Midas who not only turned the trash of everyday life into the gold of Cubist collage but also gave new value to the work of the Old Masters? Or was he a counterfeiter who mercilessly raided the styles of others? Krauss suggests that the reason we still ask these questions is that modernism itself is a hall of mirrors in which counterfeit & genuine are two sides of the same condition. Revealing Picasso s collage as a vertiginous play of voices, she shows that no single voice is authentic, no single voice sanctioned by its author. Picasso s pastiche of other artists is brilliantly brought into focus as the sublimated underbelly of Cubism itself, refashioned in the bright, clean style of the master s neoclassicism.