The Picasso Papers

Was Picasso a modern Midas, who not only turned the ephemera of modern life into the gold of Cubist collage, but also gave new value to the work of the Old Masters? Or was he a monster-counterfeiter, who mercilessly raided the styles of others? In 'The Picasso Papers', Rosalind E. Krauss shows that the reason we still ask these questions is that modernism itself is a mall of mirrors, in which 'counterfeit' and 'genuine' are two sides of the same condition. Picasso's collage is a vertiginous play of voices, Krauss argues, and no other single voice is 'authentic', or sanctioned by its maker. 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, a defence that is its own way of practising the forbidden.