Radical Picasso

More than any other modern artist, Pablo Picasso came to represent the idea of genius. Yet the aesthetic of genius, which governed Western thinking about art between the mid-eighteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, has also limited how we interpret Picasso’s work. In Radical Picasso, C.F.B. Miller dispenses with the privatized clichés that have dominated the reception of modernism’s most celebrated oeuvre. Instead, Picasso’s practice emerges as an assemblage whose density and agitation, negativity and excess, cannot be contained by hero worship (or its inverse). The artworks in question are radical not least because they strike at the visual root of theory, the perceptual root of the aesthetic. Ranging across histories of art, literature, philosophy, and science, Miller critiques the Picasso myth, rethinks cubism and surrealism, and in the process transforms our understanding of European modernism.

More than any other modern artist, Pablo Picasso came to represent the idea of genius. Yet the aesthetic of genius, which governed Western thinking about art between the mid-eighteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, has also limited how we interpret Picasso’s work. In Radical Picasso, C. F. B. Miller dispenses with the privatized clichés that have dominated the reception of modernism’s most celebrated oeuvre. Instead, Picasso’s practice emerges as an assemblage whose density and agitation, negativity and excess, cannot be contained by hero worship (or its inverse). The artworks in question are radical not least because they strike at the visual root of theory, the perceptual root of the aesthetic. Ranging across histories of art, literature, philosophy, and science, Miller critiques the Picasso myth, rethinks cubism and surrealism, and in the process transforms our understanding of European modernism.