Picasso and the Invention of Cubism

by Pepe Karmel

This book transforms our understanding of Cubism, showing in unprecedented detail how it emerged in Picasso's work of the year 1906-13, and tracing its roots in nineteenth-century philosophy and linguistics.
Linking well-known paintings and sculptures to the hitherto-ignored drawings that accompanied them, Pepe Karmel demonstrates how Picasso's quest to depict the human body with greater solidity led, paradoxically, to its fragmentation; and how Picasso used the archaic model of stage space to free himself from conventional perspective, replacing the open window of Renaissance painting with a new projective space. Rejecting the usual distinction between "analytic" and "synthetic" Cubism, Karmel shows how Picasso's changing artistic goals were realized in the crystalline Cubism of 1907-09, the gridded Cubism of 1910-11, and the planar Cubism of 1912-13.
In other chapters, Karmel discusses the empiricist philosophy championed by Hippolyte Taine, which encouraged the breakdown of painting into its abstract elements, and laid the groundwork for an art of mental association rather than naturalistic figuration. Similarly, contemporary philology provided the model for a visual language employing both metaphoric and metonymic (but not arbitrary) signs.
Combining intellectual history with close visual reading, Picasso and the Invention of Cubism opens new perspectives on the most influential movement in twentieth-century art.

248 pages, Hardcover

First published October 11, 2003