Picasso, Cubism, and Reflexivty

Abstract

The interpretation of Cubism has a great bearing on the understanding of Modernism. Cubism was the cornerstone of twentieth-century art because it broke past tradition. It established 'modernist' flatness, opti-cality and involvement with the medium of art. According to formalist and linguistic approaches, Cubism is an art about art and it is one of the earliest instances. These approaches may be classified, broadly, as Kantian. Another set of aproaches considers Cubism to be concerned with external world. The problem with the Kantian approach until now is that it has not been sufficiently historical or critical. Kantian estetik autonomy be provided with more powerful criticals and historical focus. The special achievement of Cubism, and above all of Picasso, was to reinvent classical, mediated representation, and in that reinvention also to transform it so as to reveal central conventions and mental processes. This achievement of Cubists was that of the classical minds becoming aware of its means for thinking and representing the world. This is an event that may be called reflexive. This theorical framework came from the evidence of Cubist works of art and their relation to the classical tradition. So it is necessary to examine certain crucial issues, namely, iconography, draftmanship, perspective and space time, illusionism,and semiotics of representation within the western art.