Paul Gaugin, DO Venons Nous, 1897 Edvard Munch, Dance of Life, 1899-1900 Pablo Picasso, La Vie, 1903 Pablo Picasso, Death of Casagemas, 1901 But once a real person could be placed as the model for the standing male gurethe earlier interpretations of La Vie as an allegory of maturation and development could be put aside for a more local and specic reading. (29) Pablo Picasso, La Vie, 1903 Pablo Picasso, Death of Casagemas, 1901 The problem with this reading is not that the identication is wrong, but that its ultimate aesthetic relevance is yet to be proven or evenargued (29) Pablo Picasso, Seated Bather, 1930 Pablo Picasso, Bather with Beach Ball, 1932 As difcult as if someone rst pointed to a Hals portrait of a Dutch militia ofcer and then to his rendering of the Malle Babbe and maintained they were products of different styles. But Rubin was insisting on this differenceeach model with a different name: Olga Picasso; Marie-Therese Walter. (24) The revision in the theory of representation that is current underway, in its overturning of those older beliefs [in connotation and multiplicity of meaning, not just denotation or naming], is all the more striking. The revision involves a return to a notion of pictorial representation as constituted by signs with referents but no sense: to the limiting of the aesthetic sign to extension, to the dependent condition of the classically conceived proper name. (28) Jan van Eyck, Arnolni Wedding, 1434 It is as if though the shifting, changing sands of visual polysemy, of multiple meanings and regroupings, have made us intolerably nervous, so that we wish to nd the bedrock of sense. We wish to achieve a type of signication beyond which there can be no further reading or interpretationAnd where more absolutely and appropriately thanpositive identication. (28) Pablo Picasso, Portrait of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, 1910 Pablo Picasso, The Scallop Shell, 1912 Pablo Picasso, Still Life with Chair Caning, 1912 Pablo Picasso, The Scallop Shell, 1912 Pablo Picasso, Still Life with Chair Caning, 1912 Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) SIGN SIGNIFIER s SIGNIFIED S Tree The signier is a material constituent (written trace, phonic element) and the signied, an immaterial idea or concept. (33) Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) SIGN SIGNIFIER s SIGNIFIED S Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) SIGN SIGNIFIER s SIGNIFIED S Pablo Picasso, The Scallop Shell (Notre avenir est dans lair), 1912 Pablo Picasso, The Scallop Shell (Notre avenir est dans lair), 1912 PAMPHLET Pablo Picasso, The Scallop Shell (Notre avenir est dans lair), 1912 FRENCH NATIONALISM Pablo Picasso, The Scallop Shell (Notre avenir est dans lair), 1912 Picasso as Frenchman Pablo Picasso, Violin, 1912 violin Pablo Picasso, Violin, 1912 foreshortening Pablo Picasso, Violin, 1912 The structural condition of absence is essential to the operation of the sign within Picassos collagePicasso composes the sign, not of violin, but of foreshortening And because the inscription of the fs takes place within the collage assembly and thus on the most rigidly attened and frontalized of planes, depth is thus written on the very place from which it is - within the presence of the collage - most absent. It is this experience of inscription that guarantees these forms the status of signs. (33) Pablo Picasso, Violin, 1912 What Picasso does with these fs to compose a sign of space as the condition of physical rotation, he does with the application of newsprint to construct the sign of space as penetrable or transparent. It is the perceptual disintegration of the ne-type of the printed page into a sign for the broken color with which paintings (from Rembrandt to Seurat) represent atmosphere, that Picasso continually exploits. (33) Pablo Picasso, Violin, 1912 In doing so, he inscribes transparency on the very element of the collages fabric that is most reied and opaque: its planes of newspaper. (33) Pablo Picasso, Compote Dish with Fruit, Violin, and Glass, 1912 the diacritical nature of the sign establishes it as a term whose meaning is never an absolute, but rather a choice from a set of possibilities, with meaning determined by the very terms not chosen. (35) Does this trafc light make sense? Pablo Picasso, Compote Dish with Fruit, Violin, and Glass, 1912 the diacritical nature of the sign establishes it as a term whose meaning is never an absolute, but rather a choice from a set of possibilities, with meaning determined by the very terms not chosen. (35) Pablo Picasso, Compote Dish with Fruit, Violin, and Glass, 1912 atmosphere/edge the diacritical nature of the sign establishes it as a term whose meaning is never an absolute, but rather a choice from a set of possibilities, with meaning determined by the very terms not chosen. (35) Pablo Picasso, Compote Dish with Fruit, Violin, and Glass, 1912 open/closed form the diacritical nature of the sign establishes it as a term whose meaning is never an absolute, but rather a choice from a set of possibilities, with meaning determined by the very terms not chosen. (35) Pablo Picasso, Compote Dish with Fruit, Violin, and Glass, 1912 In the great, complex cubist collages, each element is fully diacritical (37) Atmosphere / Edge Line / Color Closure / Openness Plane / Recession Pablo Picasso, Compote Dish with Fruit, Violin, and Glass, 1912 The collage element performs the occultation [hiding] of one eld in order to introject the gure of a new eld, but to introject it as gure - a surface that is the image of eradicated [demolished] surface. It is this eradication of the original surface and the reconstitution of it through the gure of its own absence that is the master term of the entire condition of collage as a system of signiers. (37) gure/ground The collage element performs the occultation [hiding] of one eld in order to introject the gure of a new eld, but to introject it as gure - a surface that is the image of eradicated [demolished] surface. It is this eradication of the original surface and the reconstitution of it through the gure of its own absence that is the master term of the entire condition of collage as a system of signiers. (37) Pablo Picasso, Still Life with Chair Caning, 1912