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.
C. F. B. Miller is Lecturer in Art History and Theory at the University of Manchester.
"A book of enormous ambition, C. F. B. Miller's Radical Picasso questions the most fundamental assumptions about the achievement of Pablo Picasso. This is absolutely a book to be contended with by anyone approaching this body of artistic production."—Charles Palermo, author of Modernism and Authority: Picasso and His Milieu around 1900
"In Miller's Radical Picasso, 'Picasso' names not a person but a heterogenous body of work—one crucial to the history of modernist art yet also constituting an immanent critique of it. Through a form of close writing cannily matched to the complexities of the work, this book recalls us from the domesticated 'Picasso' to which we have become accustomed to the more radical, disruptive, and disorienting aspects lurking within."—Lisa Florman, Professor of History of Art, Ohio State University
320 pp.7 x 10Illus: 42 color illustrations, 30 b/w illustrations
9780520290143$60.00|£50.00Hardcover
Jan 2022